Ally Schweitzer | 06.21.2011 | Washington City Paper

Silverdocs opens tonight at AFI Silver Theatre. Here's what you should see:

Hula and Natan - It doesn’t take long for the pair of Israeli brothers in Hula and Natan to telegraph “crazy”: Just look at how many cats they feed each day at their auto-repair yard in Sderot, Israel. Their manias run much deeper than that, though: Hula and Natan berate each other, their customers, and the on-air television reporters who frequent this city in the western Negev desert because of its close proximity to Gaza. Qassam rockets, fired from Gaza, occasionally drop within earshot during this tragicomic hour-long documentary shot in 2008 and 2009, and so it’s easy to imagine the brothers’ shared insanity as a symptom of living life under siege. That’s probably not the case—they’re nuts on their own terms—but their face-offs with the local land authorities who want to evict them give the pair a unique view of the Israeli state: Hula sees their junkyard, originally purchased by their father, as a metaphor for the Palestinian condition.

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