NEIGHBOURS – SLIFF Review

There is a lot of humor and sly satire in this child-centric tale looking at the roots of hate in the Middle East. Swiss-Kurdish director Mano Khalil’s NEIGHBOURS (“Nachbarn”) is a Swiss film set in Syria 40 years ago, in a small village where Kurdish and Jewish families are neighbors. Actually, at this point, there is only one Jewish family left in the village, although there used to be more, a change due to the increasingly hostile policies of the ruling Syrian Baathist party. Partly based on the director’s bittersweet memories of his own childhood, he captures the joys and heartbreak of childhood and also explores the absurdity of bigotry, antisemitism, and conflict, through the lens of those childhood memories.

“Neighbours” begins with a framing device in the present, where a Kurdish extended family is living in a refugee camp after fleeing the violence in Syria, where they are waiting to hear from someone they reached out to in Switzerland. The reply comes in the form of a picture and a request that the family patriarch (Sherzad Abdulla) identify the people in it. It is not a photo, but a child’s drawing, a drawing that sparks childhood memories of 40 years ago.

The flashback takes us back 40 years to childhood memories, when the middle-aged man was a seven-year-old boy in a small mostly Kurdish village on the Turkish-Syrian border. Starting with the subject of the drawing, little Sero (Serhed Khalil) and his beloved uncle Aram (Ismail Zagros) prank the Turkish border guards by releasing balloons in the Kurdish national colors. It is something sure to enrage the Turkish guards but it otherwise a harmless thumbing their noses at a border that divided Kurdish families, including theirs, and left them outsiders in both countries on either side.

Uncle Aram is Sero’s father’s younger brother, a fun-loving, mischievous young man whom the seven-year-old adores. In their little Kurdish village on the border, everyone knows everyone, and everyone gets along. While the kids tear playfully around the village, the village elders watch and shake their heads about “kids these days.” Sero’s neighbors are a Jewish family who his family has known, and been friendly with, for years. Sero helps them on the Sabbath by lighting the lamps and stove, something his uncle Aram used to do too when he was younger. Once, there were several Jewish families in the village but they are now the only ones left, as others have fled. They would like to leave too but now the Baathist government won’t recognize Jews as citizens or give them passports.

The village is waiting for the arrival of two things: the electrical power and the new teacher. The power lines have been in place for some time and village homes have been wired for electricity but no power has arrived yet. Sero particularly longs for electricity so he can watch cartoons like the kids in the city do – and he continually pesters his parents for a TV.

Still, there is a great deal of humor and the charm in this childhood world of play, although there is a serious side to this dramedy, and tragic events eventually strike. A lot of that charm comes from young Serhed Khalil as Sero, a sweet-faced boy full of mischief and playful joy. But all the cast bring warmth and appeal to their roles, particularly Ismail Zagros as Aram, and Uygurlar Derya as Hannah, the daughter of the Jewish family. The Jewish parents would like to escape Syria, and especially want to get their daughter out, but Hannah does not want to leave her home behind, and particularly her childhood friend Aram.

While there is still no electricity, a new teacher, Wahid Hanouf (Jalal Al Tawil), does arrive. The teacher is a rigid true-believer in Assad’s Baathist party, whose ideology is a mix of communist and pan-Arab ideas, without really being either, but with a big dose of antisemitism. The teacher thinks instilling these antisemitic ideas are as much his job as teaching reading and writing. One of the first things the teacher does is insist that the children only speak Arabic in class and at home. Sero does not much like school anyway but he is really at a loss now when the teacher insists that everyone speak only Arabic, which he neither speaks nor understands. When the teacher starts repeating old antisemitic myths, Sero doesn’t believe what the teacher says about his kindly neighbors, but other children buy in to the lies and other evilness.

The teacher is the outsider who brings hate and antisemitism to the village, and disrupts their quiet lives. He is helped along by a local man who is the village’s sole Baath party member, a membership that gave him a house and a job despite his illiteracy. These two are the primary villains of this child’s-eye-view story but other representatives of the authoritarian government in the story, such as the border guards and bureaucrats, also bring either danger or a callous indifference and corruption. The film has a powerful, satiric punch in its chilling depiction of how hatred is taught, as the teacher indoctrinates his charges in antisemitic ideas that include the old “blood libel.” Sero’s parents and grandparents, and his Jewish neighbors, are the counterbalance to this, with their long friendship and willingness to help each other.

NEIGHBOURS is both a touching, warm human tale laced with humor and childhood appeal, and a pointed satiric look at the roots of hate, not just in Syria. NEIGHBOURS, in Kurdish, Arabic, English and Hebrew with English subtitles, plays at SLIFF on Tuesday, Nov. 9 ,at 7pm and Wednesday, Nov. 10, at 4pm

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars