Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi

Described by critic Michael Chanan as a kind of Israeli Nanni Moretti, a political satirist operating on the cusp of fiction and documentary who appears in his own films, Avi Mograbi here delivers a three-part inquiry into Israeli-Palestinian relations. In one strand, he plays a man with the same name as his own whose birthday falls on Israel's Independence Day and who decides to celebrate the coincidence on the 50th anniversary. As himself, he's asked by a Palestinian film-maker to shoot material for a work on the Nakba (or Catastrophe) that hit the Palestinians on the same day in 1948. Ruin abounds. Finally he tries to sell a house with problematic land deeds. All in all, a caustic, montaged take on Israeli nationalism.