The festival, which includes seven films over six weeks, kicks off on a more light-hearted note this weekend with “A Matter of Size,” a romantic comedy about a weight-loss group that forms a Sumo squad. Visit www.iffphila.com for tickets and venue info.
A tense conflict recurs throughout many of the seven films that comprise this year’s Israeli Film Festival of Greater Philadelphia. But unlike the Israeli-Palestinian standoff that dominates headlines, the struggle in these films takes place over borders more philosophical than physical, a battle between orthodoxy and secularism.
That conflict manifests most chillingly in the documentary “Lady Kul El-Arab,” which follows the struggle of the first Druze contestant in the Miss Israel pageant, torn between conservative values and swimsuit competitions — and the target of a murder plot by her own uncle. In “For My Father,” a reluctant suicide bomber is stranded among his would-be victims for a weekend in which prejudices are revealed and problems solved in melodramatic fashion — think an Israeli “Crash.”