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Illegal immigrants run across busy highways to work sub-minimum wage jobs. They live in constant fear of being picked up by the police, and pool their resources just to eke out a meager existence. Are in Texas? California? Maybe somewhere farther north? No, keep going; keep going all the way to the other side of the world.
"9 Star Hotel" provides a ground-level view of the hard-scrabble life of a group of Palestinian laborers who sneak into the Israeli city of Modi´in each day for work then hide in makeshift shelters in the surrounding hillside. Israeli filmmaker Ido Haar spent a year filming several of these laborers and his verité footage of their subsistence-level existence bears testament to the exploitive nature of most capitalist societies. By day, these men, often the primary breadwinners for their families, provide the cheap labor needed to construct beautiful new homes for Israeli citizens; by night, they huddle together in a ramshackle hut built from garbage cobbled together from refuse from these very same construction sites.
The documentary emphasizes the communal nature of the homeless Palestinian workers, but focuses on two main characters, Ahmed and Muhammed, the first a dreamer, the second a pragmatist. Ahmed´s cheery view of the world appears to serve him much better; in one powerful scene, Muhammad suddenly collapses and falls unconscious. His friends are afraid to call an Israeli ambulance, and have to scramble for other means of assistance.
Any film about Palestinian workers in Israel is inherently political, but Haar eschews any overt political commentary. The film´s politics are written on the bodies of the workers as they face each day not knowing if they´ll wind up being arrested by Israeli police or if they´ll suffer an injury that renders them unable to work which threatens their families as well as their own livelihoods. Most of the film is devoted to nighttime sequences as the men talk to each other: about the past, about the present, about the future. Though their prospects are bleak, their emotional lives are still rich. One the simplest but most important points Haar´s film makes is that these are interesting, likeable men. Haar doesn´t shy away from depicting a few painfully awkward moments as well, such as when the men start joking about what life might be like had the Holocaust not happened.
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[release]23068[/release]