There haven’t been many films about Israelis of Ethiopian descent and even fewer television series, so the new Hot series Indal, which focuses on a group of Ethiopian young people in Ashdod, breaks new ground. The series, which is available on Next TV and Hot VOD, and scheduled to begin running on Thursday nights on Hot 3 at 10 p.m. beginning June 20, aspires to be an Israeli version of The Wire.
It shows how Ethiopian young people, especially young men, facing limited prospects, are drawn to a life of crime, preyed on by corrupt cops; alternately helped and ignored by politicians and the religious establishment; and exploited by the media when they sense a good story.
The hero is Indal (Yaniv Almench), who articulates his credo early in the first episode, saying, “All our lives, our parents were nice. Where did that get them? If we won’t be violent, they’ll keep treating us like monkeys that came down from the trees.”
Indal is smart, with movie-star good looks, but he can’t figure out that violence is a way down, not out. His uneducated parents think that beating him is still the best means of coping with him, as does his brother (Adam Kanada), who is a General Security Services agent, a success story in their tough neighborhood, and gets him out of jams. Indal is interested in Selam (Edan Saban), a girl from the neighborhood who is studying and hopes to get out of the neighborhood that way, but you can see that he must have constantly gotten into trouble when he was in school. He works stripping cars for parts in a business run by an ultra-Orthodox man, who seems to be involved in some kind of criminal ring. A complicated chain of events leads to the death of one of his friends at the hands of Alon (Shai Hai), a vicious police officer who has had it in for Indal and his friends since they were children.
When Dana (Agam Rudberg of Rehearsals and Temporarily Dead), a television journalist, comes to investigate the crime, Indal and his friends initially greet her with hostility, but, based on the first three episodes that were released to the press, she continues to dig. Alon and a group of his fellow officers, including Alex (Daniel Styopin, who plays Anatoly on Checkout and is so likable, I would bet his character will be the first one to admit to wrongdoing), who run a brothel and are involved in other criminal activities.
Like The Wire, it takes a while to get a handle on who everyone is and what they mean to each other. The better you know them, the more interesting each episode becomes. The series was created by Indal Kebede and Ori Weisbrod, and directed by Asaf Korman (Next to Her), and was inspired by Kebede’s own experiences. He became a celebrity when he appeared on Big Brother in 2017, along with Eden Saban, who is a model. Kebede has spoken about the challenge of casting mostly non-professional actors in Indal, because there simply were not enough Ethiopian actors of the appropriate age.
Although it’s not surprising in a series on this topic, Indal is very violent, from the opening scene on, and viewers should be forewarned. There is really no way to tell this story without violence, and it’s quite graphic. The series got me hooked, though, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out when the rest of the eight-episode season is released.
What other shows are available in Israel?
WHILE MANY will be delighted to see that the flying dragons and leaden dialogue of House of the Dragon are back for a second season (available now on Hot, Yes, and Cellcom TV), I was happier to see that season two of Wreck is back on Yes VOD, Sting TV, Hot VOD, and Next TV starting on June 20, and will be on Hot HBO in July. Wreck is a quirky, suspenseful, and often comic British series about Jamie (Oscar Kennedy), who joins the staff of a cruise ship after the mysterious death of his sister, who also worked there, to try to find out what really happened to her. It’s always seemed likely that a great deal of strange stuff must take place on such ships, and the first season confirmed that and then some.
The second season, which could pretty much work even if you haven’t seen the first one, moves on to dry land and amps up the horror element. The evil corporation that runs the cruise line is now operating a wellness festival in Slovenia, with similarly bad intentions, and Jamie and his friends set off to expose it.
If the whole idea of a wellness festival strikes you as borderline creepy then you will probably enjoy this season, in which Jamie gets his boat crew colleagues from the first season back together. Several of them are, predictably, enjoying the money they got from the corporation to stay silent and sign non-disclosure agreements, which they have invested in fabulous homes and extensive plastic surgery. But after something horrible happens at the wellness festival training and a single witness escapes, the gang is off in search of the truth again. It’s worth being warned in advance that there is a scene in the first episode of season two that involves drugged bodies at a festival, which is brief but disturbing, and for some people, now won’t be the right moment for the black humor of this show.
While this series might sound too off-beat for you, the best way I can convince you to try it is to note that it passed my 10-minute test: The first time I checked how far along I had gotten into it, it was way over 10 minutes, and very few series can pass this test – usually I’m checking the time after five minutes.
ONE MOVIE that didn’t need a remake is Mean Girls, but it just got one, which has inspired many people to revisit the original from 2004, available on Netflix and Apple TV+ (which also offers the new version). The original, co-written by and co-starring Tina Fey and directed by Mark Waters, has held up incredibly well, and, it features Lindsay Lohan’s best performance, along with her dual role in The Parent Trap.
If you’ve never seen it or don’t remember it, Lohan plays Cady, a girl who has just moved to an Illinois suburb after having been homeschooled by her idealistic parents in Africa, so it’s a fish-out-of-water comedy – she doesn’t know what she’s in for. What makes the movie engaging is that it plays on our desire both to be popular and to condemn those who are more popular than us for their shallowness, a theme Fey has explored many times. At first, Cady falls in with two outsiders, Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and Damien (Daniel Franzese), but then is taken up by the Plastics, the clique that gives the movie its title, played by Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert. Cady convinces herself that she is just infiltrating them to help Janis engineer their downfall, but she enjoys being one of the queens of the high school until she doesn’t. It turns out that Cady – and all of us – have the seeds of meanness in us, and although goodness mostly prevails, it’s fun watching it play out. You can’t help feeling delighted when you see the mechanics of how the Plastics operate, and learn that even within the clique, there is a hierarchy.
Mean Girls will either make you feel nostalgic for the rigid social rules of high school or glad you don’t have to deal with that anymore. Caplan, McAdams, and Seyfried have all gone on to become much bigger stars and Fey is on hand as a bitter, divorced math teacher.