Israeli director Eran Riklis has made eight features since 1984, but he didn't have much of a fan base in this country until his previous film, The Syrian Bride (2004), became an international hit. That film is set on what's meant to be the wedding day of a young Druze woman living on the Golan Heights and a successful TV actor in Syria. Most of the movie--which has a lot of characters, including the bride's teeming family and a well-meaning, female UN liaison officer--deals with the bureaucratic mess that breaks out when the Israeli border guards refuse to let the bride cross into Syria. Like a lot of foreign films that score with American audiences, the movie is basically folk humor: it applies a craziness-of-the-human-carnival approach to a painful, complicated political situation. Trying to understand it by reading the paper can make your head spin, but watching the movie, you may begin to feel that you get it now, because it's just a series of compounded misunderstandings and blinkered viewpoints. It might even make you feel that everything could be sorted out fast if only everybody would see this movie: then the guilty parties would all slap their foreheads and say, "Oh, wow, I didn't realize that our petty little disputes were complicating nice people's lives in this way! Let's go tear down the walls, link hands, and sing 'Kumbaya'." I suspect that many people who loved The Syrian Bride assumed that it marked the debut of a new, young director, because it's simplistic in a way that can seem charming in someone who's not old enough to know better. But it also showed the canniness of a seasoned pro in such touches as the way the lively supporting cast of characters kept things hopping on the margins, while the title character was left beautifully blank, so that she wouldn't have any personality traits that might get in the way of her ability to represent anything the viewer wanted her to, and so that her final action would count as a surprise ending , no matter what it was. (The surprise was that she had a strong desire to go in one direction or the other.)

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