-- This review may contain spoilers --

I saw this at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's amazing that one man could have three movies made about his work, but that's the case with Pierre Dulaine. Mad Hot Ballroom was a surprise hit (for a documentary),being shown in theaters for six months. Take the Lead was a dramatization, with Antonio Banderas playing Pierre. That was much more Hollywood-ish, but there was a tango in it that was worth the price of admission!

An obvious question is whether Dancing in Jaffa is just Mad Hot Ballroom set in the Middle East. I don't think so. I like movies that turn out to be about something other than what you think they are. People may buy tickets for this because they liked MHBr or like ballroom dancing, or have heard of the Dancing Classrooms program, and they'll be glad they did. But my takeaway was more about the Middle East than anything else, and a team of Clydesdales couldn't drag me to see a film on the Middle East. After all we've read, the decades we've seen of strike (and the centuries of strife before that we know about),the endless rounds of peace talks, truces, terrorism, protests, evictions, posturing, threats and war, I never want to hear about that place again. And yet, we need to. DiJ gently, very gently, exposes us to slices of life we'd never see, bitterness and sweetness, but doesn't drift into the saccharine.

Kids get rescued by the most unlikely people and the most unlikely activities. Chess ramps up the mind of a boy in the ghetto. Choir keeps a young girl from hanging out with the wrong crowd. An environmental program rounds up toughs to clean an urban riverbank and one of them becomes a biologist. Still, ballroom dancing seems a particularly obscure way to approach this. Dulaine himself admits it. But it's his life, so naturally he deploys his tool. He was born in Jaffa so you can't criticize him for cultural imperialism or some such. It's a worthwhile program and is continuing there, and in other cities around the world.

It's a worthwhile film, too. More than an advertisement for a particular NGO, it's a testament to the power of one person, using this implausible approach, to do something that at least brightens the days of some children. Twenty years from now, I'd like to hear the interview with someone who advanced out of poverty or depression, who when asked what spurred him or her on, begins his or her answer with, "well you're not going to believe this, but the turning point for me was a foxtrot in the fifth grade taught by this guy named Pierre Dulaine…"

Hilla Medalia is an award-winning 36-year-old Israeli documentary filmmaker whose 2007 To Die in Jerusalem brought together in dialogue (by satellite) the mothers of two teenage girls paired on a 'Newsweek' cover, a Palestinian suicide bomber and an Israeli girl killed by her bomb. Her new film is about a less grim effort by famous ballroom teacher Pierre Dulaine to bring Jewissh and Palestinian kids together on the dance floor, and we see some little friendships and personalities bloom in his modest "peace process."

Jaffa, once a Palestinian town, is now a poor, mixed suburb of Tel Aviv. The intense 2009 joint Israeli- Arab feature film 'Ajami' focused on a rough part of Jaffa. In 'Dancing in Jaffa,' Hilla Medalia follows Pierre Dulaine as he goes back to Jaffa, where he was born in 1944, son of an Irish father and Palestinian mother. (In the film he never mentions that his mother was also half French, which explains "Pierre.") He has not been back since his family was driven out when he was a child. He comes to introduce to Palestinian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli, and mixed schools in Jaffa his Dancing Classrooms, a social development program for fifth- graders that uses ballroom dancing "as a vehicle to change the lives of the children and their families" (Wikipedia). This time the primary "change" is the somewhat radical one of pairing Jewish and Arab girls and boys as dance partners.

In teaching gawky eleven-year-olds to dance, the pixieish Dulaine emphasizes etiquette, dignity, and respect from the get-go. He has to give up on one school because they boys won't dance. The more extreme Muslim males won't touch girls, or at first refuse. Things don't go that well at first, and for a while Pierre brings over from the States his (dancing, not life) partner of 35 years, Yvonne Marceau. Their dancing together for the kids inspires them: you can see the boys' eyes light up; they are charmed.

Medalia follows several of the kids more closely, notably Noor, a plump, dark Palestinian girl whose grief over the death of her father makes her sullen, depressed, and sometimes violent. Alaa is a small boy who lives in a shack with his poor fisherman father. Alaa, dark and all smiles, and Brenda, a curly-haired Jewish girl fathered out of a sperm bank, become partners for the upcoming dance contest, and their jaunt on Alaa's father's little rowboat heralds a budding friendship. But the real miracle is Noor, who shows rhythm and grace from the start, and whose selection for the competition is part of a reawakening and new happiness that you can't help being a little amazed by. Ah, fifth graders: this is the age when kids are most open and malleable.

The film shows other things, like Dulaine approaching his family's original residence and beating a hasty retreat when the current occupants are not just unfriendly but apparently downright hostile. Dulaine mostly speaks English, but he also speaks Arabic to the kids who understand Arabic. For Hebrew, he has an interpreter or the teachers translate for him. The schools he visits are Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Jewish, and mixed Palestinian-Jewish. There are seven different dances in the lessons and final contest, though merengue and rumba seem to predominate. At the final contest, all the parents are as excited as you'd expect. Each dance couple pairs a Palestinian and a Jew. And nobody seems to mind. At least for the moment, Dulaine has achieved reconciliation and crossed barriers that earlier, seemed uncrossable.

All this will be vaguely familiar, because you've probably seen a couple of other movies Pierre Dulaine inspired, the 2006 musical drama 'Take the Lead,' starring Antonio Banderas as Dulaine, and 'Mad Hot Ballroom,' a heartwarming and popular 2005 documentary about New York fifth graders who learn dance and take part in a dance contest. However, Dancing in Jaffa prefers not to mention these, and alludes only vaguely to Pierre Dulaine's fame as a ballroom dancer when he partnered with Yvonne Marceau at Jacob's Pillow, on Broadway, and in London, or his having been on the faculties of the School of American Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Juilliard School. This movie isn't about that. It's about little Jewish and Palestinian Israeli kids being polite and friendly and wiggling their hips gracefully together. 'Dancing in Jaffa,' a fairly simple and minimal film, isn't as priceless and cute or as proficiently made as Mad Hot Ballroom. But the gaps it bridges are, of course, more significant.

'Dancing in Jaffa,' 84 mins., in Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles debuted in NYC in January 2013, and was included in the Tribeca and Sydney festivals. It has been picked up by Sundance Selects. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 26-Aug. 10, 2013).

Director Hilla Medalia is back to her two standard disciplines: Gaza Strip and documentaries. This one here also has massive focus on dancing. After seeing the fictional movie "Bethlehem" not too long ago, I decided to follow up with this one here as a new addition to the difficult Middle East topic.

This documentary centers on children from an Arab and a Jewish school who are told to dance together and participate in a contest. Besides the kids, the central character is former professional dancer Pierre Dulaine, obviously quite a character. You can either love or hate him. Only one thing is possible. Sometimes he seemed genuine, sometimes he seemed way over the top and there were some cringeworthy scenes like when he randomly invited his dance partner from decades ago. That's why the real highlight of the film were the children. There were a handful scenes that were pretty cute and funny at the same time, like the way they didn't want to dance with each other initially or the look in the face of one little boy, always skeptical, which was probably his nature. Or maybe it was just a false impression as he was dancing later on with one of the girls. The invitation for the boat trip was pretty cute too.

The film is at its weakest in the first half when we basically see American Idol like drama that Mr. Dulaine is not able of convincing the kids to join in and dance and overcome the obstacle of their origins. It all seems so fake and forced. Very much scripted drama. As the documentary progresses, it gets much better. May be a mean thing to say, but the reason for this could have been that Dulaine had less screen time and the kids became the real center of the film. He certainly is an inspiring personality and the trigger for the children to accept each other for what they are, but still his behavior often seems as if he wants this story to be told around him and not about the mentality of acceptance.

Despite this approach, you should not watch the film as the ultimate solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but just for its positive message and maybe for a glimmer of hope that things may look different in 20-30 years when the next generation has arrived. On a final note, I want to add that I really liked the ending in which the Arab-Israeli team did not actually win the competition would have been too expected and cheesy). This was not necessary so that you will leave the theater with a smile, which also arises from several scenes and entertaining dialogs like the one mentioning a sperm bank. You will know what I mean when you watch it. Go for it.