88
Boston Globe by Loren King
It is haunting in its literal and symbolic meanings, which is the powerful, lingering effect of Yellow Asphalt.
Yellow Asphalt (Asphalt Zahov)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Israel
- 2001
- · 87m
Director
Dan Verete
Cast
Moshe Ivgy,
Raida Adon,
Tatjana Blacher,
Motti Katz,
Sami Samir
Genre
Drama,
Romance
Three stories set among the Bedouin of Jahalin in the hills of the Judean desert. On an almost deserted highway, two Israeli truckers strike a Bedouin lad accidentally. Before they can flee, the boy's people appear and circle the truckers. Retribution? In a tent, elders judge a woman seeking divorce; she wants to leave with her young daughters. They deny the suit. That night she gathers her girls and runs. Her husband pursues her. The Bedouin maid of a married Israeli hot-house farmer is discovered in adultery; with her life in danger, she seeks protection from her lover. He turns her away and involves a Bedouin farmhand in disposing of her. What tribal justice awaits?
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What are critics saying?
80
Variety
With its remarkably intimate look at Israeli Bedouin culture, a subject heretofore little treated, Danny Verete's Yellow Asphalt is a deeply affecting and brutally uncompromising anthology of three unrelated stories.
75
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
More than the sum of its parts.
70
TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox
These three films form a remarkably cohesive whole, both visually and thematically, through their consistently sensitive and often exciting treatment of an ignored people.
70
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.
63
New York Post
So lovingly and perceptively filmed that you can almost taste the desiccated air.
40
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.
40
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
Though it's tempting to praise Verete for having the courage to show the worst of both worlds, only a propagandist could get away with being so reductive; an artist should be held to a higher standard.
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