Idealism prevails in drama about Israeli-Palestinian troubles

Event preview

Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Through Feb. 20 at United Artists North Point Market 8, Georgia Theatre Company Merchants Walk, Lefont Sandy Springs, United Artists Tara Cinemas 4 and Atlantic Station Stadium 16. $11; ages 65 and up, students with IDs and ages 12 and under, $9; weekday matinees through 4 p.m., $8. 1-866-214-2072, www.ajff.org.

When it comes to putting on a pout, Tal Levine, French actress Agathe Bonitzer’s character in “A Bottle in the Gaza Sea,” can give Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan a run for her mopy. But unlike “Twilight’s” Bella, who’s eternally biting her lip over fictional vampire business, Tal frets over matters more real.

A 17-year-old French girl only recently settled in Jerusalem with her family, she is haunted by the random violence she witnesses firsthand and watches on the always-on TV news during the escalating Israel-Gaza conflict of 2007-08 — and has nightmares that she may be the next victim.

“A Bottle in the Gaza Sea,” which is being given the first of three Atlanta Jewish Film Festival screenings this weekend, as the three-week fest reaches its midway point, is a potent, if not perfect, French-Israeli production. Based on a young-adult novel by French author Valerie Zenatti, director Thierry Binisti’s film is one of the best dramas among the AJFF’s 71 titles.

Tal expresses her anxiety by penning a message in a bottle with questions about a world, in her view, gone violently wrong. Her soldier-brother tosses it into the Mediterranean for her, and it washes up on a Gaza beach, where it’s recovered by a group of intense Palestinian buddies, who poke fun at her seeming naivete.

But like the best young-adult novel heroines, Tal is plucky. When one of the young men, 20-year-old Naim (Mahmoud Shalaby), emails a challenging response, she holds her ground.

Alert viewers will see it coming that the caustic emailing will eventually give way to a more caring version — and the blooming of a virtual Romeo and Juliet-style romance. But “Bottle” nonetheless pulls viewers in because of a story that explains both sides clearly without taking one or the other, and location shooting that makes the troubles more tangible.

Bonitzer and Shalaby are persuasive as young romantics who help each other arrive at wider worldviews, and even their parents, so often dramatized as buffoons in young-adult stories like these, are three-dimensional. In fact, the Israeli-born Muslim actress Hiam Abbass (perhaps best known on these shores for “Munich”) gives the film’s most resonant turn as Naim’s widowed mother, a hospital worker who can’t seem to heal any aspect of their anxious lives in Gaza.

Like her character, “A Bottle in the Gaza Sea” doesn’t arrive at easy answers. But it finds humanity and something approaching hope amid the carnage of military conflict, remarkable indeed.

It shows at 2 p.m. Feb. 10 at Atlantic Station and 11:35 a.m. Feb. 18 at Lefont Sandy Springs. (The Feb. 17 screening is sold out.)

Other AJFF highlights over the next week (advance reservations suggested):

• "Undressing Israel: Gay Men in the Promised Land," a 46-minute documentary tour that introduces a variety of gay events and men, from a parliament member to an Arab-Israeli journalist. (11:55 a.m. Feb. 8, Atlantic Station)

• "Paris-Manhattan" is a French romantic comedy about a loveless 30-something's obsession with Woody Allen movies and the dashing Frenchman who may represent her own happy ending. (12:25 p.m. Feb. 8, Atlantic Station; Feb. 14 sold out)

• "A.K.A. Doc Pomus" is a documentary about the disabled songwriter behind hits including "Save the Last Dance for Me." (2:30 p.m. Feb. 8, Atlantic Station; Feb. 19 sold out)

• "God's Neighbors" is a drama-thriller in which Orthodox protagonist Avi and his posse police/terrorize their neighborhood, until a secular woman causes him to question his beliefs. (8 p.m. Feb. 9, Atlantic Station; Feb. 10 and 15 sold out)

• "When Day Breaks" is a drama in which a retired Serbian music professor belatedly finds out that his parents were Jews murdered in the Holocaust, not the Christian farmers who raised him. (11:35 a.m. Feb. 10, Lefont Sandy Springs)

• "The Rabbi's Cat" is a French animated film based on Joann Sfar's best-selling graphic novel about a rabbi and his "kosher" kitty. (1:50 p.m. Feb. 10, Atlantic Station; 1:55 p.m. Feb. 17, Lefont Sandy Springs, in 3-D)

• In "The Dandelions," a French-Jewish girl seeks escape from her dysfunctional family. Her therapist is played by Isabella Rossellini. (4:30 p.m. Feb. 10 and 12:10 p.m. Feb. 13, both at Lefont Sandy Springs)

• In the documentary "Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir," the Polish-French filmmaker shares raw recollections of tragic real-life episodes that haunt him and his movies. (4:40 p.m. Feb. 10, Lefont Sandy Springs)

• "El Gusto" is a documentary about Chaabi, an Algerian musical form uniting Spanish rhythms and Arabic vocals. (9:10 p.m. Feb. 11 and 2:40 p.m. Feb. 15, both at Lefont Sandy Springs)