Dancing Arabs offers an edgy coming-of-age story

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      Starring Tawfeek Barhom and Danielle Kitzis. In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles. Rated PG.

      This subdued Israeli drama follows an Arab schoolboy to graduation, when he makes an irreversible decision that renders everything we’ve seen less interesting than what he might do after the credits roll.

      It’s based on a semi-autobiographical novel by acclaimed Palestinian-Israeli author Sayed Kashua, and like all good novels, Dancing Arabs stays with you, leaving you wishing you could follow certain characters down other paths. The film ultimately seems undercooked—but it’s sure made of quality ingredients.

      We meet Eyad as a gifted youngster, able to win a TV contest and get accepted into an elite Jewish school. We learn that his dad was also a promising student until his arrest for political activism—or was it terrorism? Eyad’s pride in calling his dad a “terrorist” is played for laughs, part of director Eran Riklis’s light touch when it comes to tracing the plight of Israeli Arabs in the 1980s and ’90s.

      As a teen, Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom) excels at school and gets the hottest Jewish girl there (Danielle Kitzis) to fall for him, a disappointingly Hollywood twist. He also tutors his Jewish doppelgänger, which proves the more fruitful plot line. At one point, Eyad calls out Israeli novelists on their depictions of Arabs in his literature class. The film’s best moment comes when he sits in the cafeteria afterward: instead of getting the side-eye from his classmates, one of them whispers, “He was awesome!” Those unexpectedly humane moments make this tale of compromised identity eminently watchable.

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