Harmony in desert song

When the young Israeli writer Eran Kolirin first submitted to his homeland's funding body the script he wanted to make as his directing debut, he received a to-the-point assessment: "It's too small and nothing really happens," was the verdict, recalls Kolirin, rousing himself at 10 on a Tel Aviv morning. "How can Israelis and Egyptians come together and then nothing come of it?"

That, to Kolirin, was the point. In his story, titled The Band's Visit, the Alexandria Police Orchestra, a traditional Arab ensemble, fetch up in Israel to play the opening of an Arab cultural centre but soon manage to strand themselves in a small town in the middle of the desolate Negev desert.

Drolly framed in their powder blue uniforms against the bare, monochromatic settings, the musicians are aliens in a country their nation has been at war with several times in the last six decades. But their night in the hamlet of Bet Hativka is marked not by political debate or grand rapprochement, but intimate, unexpected encounters. Billeted by locals more bored than alarmed, there are awkward dinners, personal confessions and a visit to a roller disco.

"There's obviously a context to film, and sometimes the absence is stronger than the presence," explains Kolirin. "That was the most important thing in the movie for me. I had to find the balance between the writer and the politician."

The concerns of the characters have little to do with their nationalities. They are lonely, misunderstood and hesitant; also earthy, funny and stumbling towards compassion. The deputy conductor of Alexandria Police Orchestra, the halting Simon (Khalifa Natour), even comes to represent Kolirin, the hopeful artist who worries that he will never finish his piece of work. Simon doesn't know how to finish his concerto; Kolirin didn't know how to conclude his screenplay.

"Along the way I started to believe the assessments, so I tried to fuse my story with a high concept and dramatic turbulence and it never felt right," Kolirin notes. "Sometimes you have to get over your bad habits from writing television of having characters talk too much and explain everything they do. Just before we began shooting I started writing it all over from the beginning, so it was close to what I'd first written but more developed. That's when I found the tone."

The film's central relationship is between the orchestra's leader, the formal, rigid officer Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) and the proprietor of the local cafe, the blunt, unassuming Dina (Ronit Elkabetz). Husky voiced and matter of fact about her life, the Israeli woman initially overwhelms the Egyptian man, but it's an assault borne not of confidence but loneliness. She's desperate to make a connection with someone and only with that realisation does the martinet reveal the man behind the epaulettes.

"Ronit is a very famous actress here, but it took me time to figure out she was perfect for the part because I'm not very good at casting," admits Kolirin. "I checked everyone else until she came and then I realised that I was very stupid. I'm not one of those directors who say, 'I always knew' - at best I try and hope it will work. But in the movie there's a kind of magic that happens between Sasson and Ronit. And that's the only word that has the right definition: magic."

His final cast spanned the country's diverse, often forgotten, citizenship. Gabai, for example, is an Arab Jew of Iraqi heritage, while Natour and Saleh Bakri, who plays the band's Chet Baker-referencing Lothario, Khaled, are Palestinian Israelis, who've done most of their training and work on the stage. Cast and crew spoke Hebrew on the set, and as Kolirin points out their concerns were professional not political.

"It wasn't any harder than anyone else doing a movie who just feels panicked and is wondering how it will be received and if it will be understood. Those are the fears you have to deal with during the making of a movie," he says. "We had no problems in doing the film with Jewish and Palestinian actors, although that's what the Western world expects me to say. There were no tensions on set, there were no problems getting everyone together. Very early on the movie touched everyone's shared nostalgia and we did it together."

Everything Kolirin and his associates put into The Band's Visit was vindicated just over a year ago, when the movie went from being a minor Israeli title to international acclaim when it won a Jury prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Subsequently it collected eight statues at the Israeli Film Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Gabai) and Best Actress (Elkabetz).

It was assumed that The Band's Visit would be Israel's submission for Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards, but it was denied the international platform on an unforeseen technicality. More than 50% of the picture's dialogue is spoken in English, a natural occurrence in a film where people from two divided nations are looking for a common language.

"For a week or so it made the headlines in the newspapers," concedes the filmmaker. "For me it mattered for a day but really I didn't care much because the movie got more attention than I could hope for. I never had a big dream of winning an Oscar - I was excited enough to get to Cannes and win a prize there. The big American dream never really came into it."

Satisfaction now for Kolirin, who is at work on two new scripts that have few funding problems awaiting them, comes from unconventional channels. Recently The Band's Visit has been favourably reviewed in Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers, even though the film hasn't been released in either country. "It's a popular bootleg, I believe," Kolirin says.

Given the film's preference for the idiosyncratic over the conventional, it's a fitting outcome.

The Band's Visit opens June 26