Origin: Israel | Documentary | Director: Guri Alfi | 50 minutes

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Two parts of a comedy television series set at a bilingual Jewish-Arab high school in Israel. This unique setting serves as the background for many challenges, dilemmas, and conflicts that the students, teachers, and parents deal with throughout the episodes. The children studying at Madrasa are learning how to break down age-old walls of suspicion, racism, and hostility.

From the pen of politically astute Palestinian Israeli writer Sayed Kashua (Arab Labor, The Writer) and Israeli Jewish director Guri Alfi (The Chef) comes Madrasa, a fast-paced comic TV series set at the Peace School for Bilingual Education in Jerusalem. Palestinian Israeli Khaled starts attending the school when his family moves from Haifa because his dad gets a job at Hadassah Medical Center. Shira, a Jewish Israeli student who is thinking about jumping ship for a larger “more normal” high school experience, falls hard for Khaled. Kashua and Alfi deftly portray how these young Arab and Jewish people communicate, while it’s their parents who future-trip about what their attractions and attendance at the school means. Kashua’s script effortlessly mixes the growing pains of adolescence against a backdrop of more serious conflicts that Israeli society is undergoing. Some Jewish students are leaving the school, but for many of the Arab students, it’s the best school available to them academically. From a young Arab woman who is afraid to tell her classmates she has decided to wear a headscarf to two boys who find common ground in their love of manga, Madrasa depicts teens of two cultures learning together with a delightful multilingual soundtrack.

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