Hilla Medalia’s modest, watchable documentary is about Pierre Dulaine, a ballroom dancer and teacher whose work with underprivileged New York schoolchildren was the inspiration for a fiction feature, Take the Lead (2006) starring Antonio Banderas as Pierre. This film is about Dulaine’s return to Jaffa, the city of his birth, and his attempt to set up a new school dance programme to get Jewish and Palestinian children to come together for the first time in their lives, and partner up for waltzes, tangoes and rumbas – a kind of Strictly Come Dancing-style kids’ version of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It’s a nice idea, and there is something touching and important in showing how the boys and girls are – of course – so shy and giggly with each other at first. Dulaine gets us to realise that we’re all just human beings. This is the real barrier to peace, and one that can be surmounted. Dulaine is a force for good, and the film’s likability outweighs any pessimism or cynicism.
