It was another film festival weekend! On Saturday night we watched‘James’ journey to Jerusalem’.

Before the start of the movie we had a brief but candid conversation with a couple seated next to us after exchanging the customary Vancouver pleasantries (i.e. where we’re from, where we’ve been, how versed we are in each other’s culture, mention that we have friends from each other’s country and then move on to the weather). The couple, originally from Israel having lived in New York for years and traveled all over the world, had a refreshingly non-politically correct yet socially conscious view on societal perception, racism, civil rights and equality. It set the tone for the movie, which it seemed everyone had an agenda for going to see it.

JJTJ is a humorous human rights tale that tackles Israel’s other issue; illegal migrant workers, it also satires the concept of Israel as the ‘Holy Land’, and Jerusalem’s a metaphor if you will for a lateral theory that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. Admirably the plot didn’t make heroes out the characters as it examines human exploitation as a tool inherent in everyman who ever tried to survive this money hungry world or in this case the new Israel. There’s a subplot, which features the struggle for ownership of land, and the symbolism of losing land as losing oneself.

The film’s theme song (played throughout the movie) is ‘Jerusalem’, a Ghanaian folk song sang in a local dialect (Twi, which I speak fluently, thank you very much!) that extols Jerusalem as our ‘destiny’… the final place of peace and prosperity, which is most ironic in today’s world and for the lead character James.

James leaves his South African village to visit Jerusalem, the holy land about which so much has been said in his bible but before his makes it to Jerusalem he’s thrown into deportation jail at the airport on suspicion of being there to work illegally. James soon finds out that the present ‘holy land’ isn’t anything like his bible said. In modern Israel there’s a crackdown on over 500,000 illegal migrant workers believed to have taken work away from the Israelis.

James soon adapts to the new ‘holy land’, even works the ‘system’ to his advantage and learns the basic lesson of modern day survival, never to become a ‘frayer’ (a pushover). In the end James gets his wish and sees Jerusalem, which is the biggest paradox of it all. JJTJ is in Hebrew, Zulu and English (with subtitles) is a modern day comedy with ancient origins, I walked away contemplating the fact that even though I probably will never visit my ‘Israel’ or the actual Israel for that matter, the holy land is not a physical mass of soil sitting somewhere, it’s a thing of the mind.

PLAYING: Never leave you - Lumidee

READING: Hey, Nostradamus! – Douglas Coupland

WATCHING: Two and the Half Men

QUOTE: “I'd never thought you'd be the one, make me shine brighter than the sun”