arts & culture
bonus digital content
Israeli Drama Film ‘Concerned Citizen’
Tackles Gentrification and Race Issues in Tel Aviv
T Sarah Rosen | JTA.org
he Israeli satirical drama film
“Concerned Citizen” opens
with the sacrosanct rituals of a
bourgeois Tel Aviv life: a robot vacuum
slides gracefully across the floor; lush
house plants are watered; vegetables
are blended into green juice. The score
from the Bellini opera “Norma” plays in
the background.

Then a car alarm rudely interrupts
the utopia.

20 JUNE 8, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
It only gets worse from here for
Ben and Raz, a progressive Israeli
gay couple (played by actors Shlomi
Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, who are also
a couple in real life) living in a pristine
renovated apartment in a gentrifying
neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. When
Ben, a landscape architect, plants a tree
on their block, his seemingly innocent
desire to improve the neighborhood
quickly goes awry, and a series of
events forces him to face his own
repressed prejudices and hypocrisy.

With the tension of a thriller,
“Concerned Citizen,” the second
feature film by Israeli writer-director
Idan Haguel, tackles the universal
themes of privilege and multicultural
tension in gentrifying cities, using the
hyper-specific lens of Neve Sha’anan —
the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that’s
home to many of the country’s foreign
workers and asylum seekers, as well
as the city’s notoriously rundown (but
culturally vibrant) Central Bus Station.

After making its world premiere last
year at the famed Berlin International
Film Festival, the movie debuted in
select U.S. theaters last week and will
also be available to rent on Amazon
and Apple TV+.

Ben and Raz’s apartment, a hot
commodity in one of the world’s most
expensive cities, is the axis around
which much of the drama revolves. In
one scene, a French-Jewish woman
looks into buying the apartment sight
unseen. Their neighbors include both
the extremely vulnerable and the
Guy Sahaf via JTA.org
Shlomi Bertonov, right, as Ben in “Concerned Citizen”