A really good movie that demands a lot of attention: Ajami

It was probably a mistake to watch the Israeli film "Ajami" on a Friday night when I was dead tired because this film was really quite good and demands a lot of attention, which couldn't really give it. Don't worry, I won't give the plot away because I can hardly remember it - I'll need some help. But I would say it's another one of the recent spate of movies that takes seemingly unrelated characters and events and over the course of the narrative pulls them together, as they intersect in violence and tragedy. Making this narrative structure even more difficult than usual, however, Ajami (which I gather is the name of a Palestinian West Bank neighborhood?), the film does not use straightforward chronology; rather, we see certain scenes that are hard to comprehend (even if you're awake!) and later see the scenes the build up to them or put them in context. Further difficulty for Americans will be the general unfamiliarity of the name and the locales - hard to understand which neighborhoods are in Israel, West Bank, Arab, Jewish, etc. Still - a very strong film that is taut and exciting and gives us a sense of what life is like among the many racial-ethnic communities living alongside one another in Israel/West Bank today. Story begins with a drive-by shooting of a Palestinian teen, in revenge for an attack against another Palestinian gang. Over the course of the movie we meet another Palestian man who is trying to negotiate peace for his family in this gang war and falls in love with the daughter of the neighborhood strongman (they're Christian Arabs, but this is not clear to us or at least to me till much later), a Palestinian living without papers in Israel and working in a restaurant, an Israeli police officer whose brother has been killed in the service, a Palestinian restaurant owner dating an Isreali Jew - almost all of these people come to a bad end, and the movie is about how and why this happens. It's in some ways about life in one particular time and place, but it strikes me that Ajami could easily be transported to any American city and the same story could take root and thrive.