Un Certain Regard: “The Band’s Visit” by Eran Kolirin

Presented in the section Un Certain Regard, The Band’s Visit is 34-year-old Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin’s first feature-length film. This whimsical tale, in the running for a
Camera d’Or award, follows the iconoclastic adventures of a band of Egyptian musicians who, by some happenstance, are lost in a small town in the Israeli desert. The monotonous daily routine of
the inhabitants is about to be shaken up…

“When I was a child, I often watched Egyptian films with my family”, mused Eran Kolirin. “It was a common practice in Israel in the early 1980s. In the late afternoon on Friday, we’d
be glued to the screen, watching complicated intrigues, impossible loves, and heartbreaking tear-jerkers starring Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamam, I’del Imam, and all the other regulars, on the
only national television network Israel had at the time. It was pretty strange, in fact, for a country that spent half its time at war with Egypt and the other half in a sort of cold and barely
cordial peace with its neighbor to the south.”

Photo copyright Anne-Laure Bigot