the Film Festival

As is tradition with me for the past seven years now, I attended the opening of the Jerusalem Film Festival at Sultan's Pool to see movie Wall-E. For me, the summer has officially begun and with it all the fun the season has to offer.

Everyone around me is travelling here and there. Outside the country and inside the country. It's unaffordable for us right now to travel outside Israel and Hubby has his busy season during the summer. The roads, camping sites, water parks, spas, Galilee guest houses, lakes and beaches are packed full. It's not even enjoyable to be in such sardine mode. So I'll wait to travel until October/November - when the weather cools down and the crowds have gone back home, and the rates are cheaper.

So I will stick to Jerusalem this summer because there's enough happening here.

On Saturday I hitchhiked from my town to Jerusalem because there is no bus service that day - the day of rest. However, my idea of a day of rest is to sit in a beautifully renovated air-conditioned movie theater to see films from all over the world during the festival. There was no problem getting a lift. Everyone feels bad for Saturday car-less travelers. I got a ride straight to the cinemateque from someone who thought the empty roads was a speed race track, and I was stupid enough to let him go speeding off to Jerusalem instead of telling him off. I even let him smoke in his car. Disgusting.

The first movie I saw was Mongol, about the early history of Genghis Khan and the second movie I saw was Of Time and the City, a documentary about the city of Liverpool, England. I sat separately from my friend and was surprised to see the theater full. Was everyone as interested in Liverpool as I was? Were they all Beatles' fans? I had the unfortunate experience to have sat next to a "breather." This is the kind of person who exhales profusely and you feel their breath on your arms, as you watch your army hair blow in different directions each time the person exhales. I tried positioning my arms in different directions, but to no avail. Thank God it wasn't a two hour movie, that's all.

The Deal was the next movie I saw. More hilarious than I expected. The movie starred William Macy, who was brilliant in this film, and Meg Ryan. And Israeli moviegoers just love it when actors in Hollywood films - who play, well, Israelis - can say things in Hebrew like "metumtam (idiot) and only they will understand what it means.

After that was a French flick called Naissance des Pieuvres. Gotta see those French flicks about those coming-of-age movies about teens and the agonies in their lives.

Meanwhile, in between films, we saw friends we hadn't seen in years and ate good food in the cinemateque cafeteria whose hostesses always claimed there was no room, but when you swoosh past them you can get a table somewhere... Over Irish coffee and ice coffee we surmised about the men in our lives and in our friends lives, and usually about how awful they are (the men, not our friends). Were there ever any decent men around? Ever? Why don't I know any, except for the ones dating my girls. And we laughed about some of their obsessive compulsiveness and perfectionist traits, as well as coming to the realization now that those wonderfully social, "men about town" usually come with a lot of baggage and dish out a lot of heartache.

I mentioned to my friend that I had been emailing someone with Cerebral Palsey because he had made me laugh on the Jerusalem email list when he was looking for someone to help him do his emails and write for him. He described himself much this way:

"I look retarded but I'm not." Which prompted me to write him back something along the lines of "I don't look retarded but I am..."

We'll probably see a movie together one day this week. I already told him I'll be able to spot him easily in a crowd, so he need not worry about me recognizing him.

So we laughed and cried about all the funny, sad, exciting and awful stuff going on in our lives. There's nothing like having a great friend to share all the things you're going through.