There's a small but telltale moment in the first episode of Matabb, the new - indeed, first - Palestinian soap opera, when the camera shows a flashy, cherry-red BMW with the yellow licence plate starting to fall off. It is meant to tell you everything you need to know about its slick-haired driver, Abdallah - glossy on the outside, but really a thieving braggart not to be trusted with young ladies.
Indeed, as the show progresses it becomes clear that Abdallah is up to no good with the sweetly naive object of his affections, Sameer. So far, so soap opera - good girl falls for the wrong boy - but in the context of Palestinian courtship, it has an entirely different resonance.
You have to know more than a little about the region to understand, for example, that Israeli cars, whose yellow plates allow them to pass through areas largely unavailable to Palestinian white-plated cars, are commonly stolen and taken for joyrides across the West Bank. And few West Bankers would own a garish BMW or paint a stolen one red; the colour is more of a nod to passion than realism.
Based on the lives of Palestinians working in a non-governmental organisation, Matabb has an unlikely muse: it hopes to be the West Bank's answer to EastEnders. The directors of Matabb - which means Speed Bump - aim to tap into the same type of gritty social realism that has marked the British series.
?We based the show on what we saw here, from our own lives, and from what people said to us on the street,? said Farid Majari, the producer of the show and director of the Goethe Institute in Ramallah, which funded the series along with the German Development Corporation and the European Commission.
So instead of the trials of the East End we get issues drawn from everyday life in the West Bank capital of Ramallah: from passing through Israeli checkpoints to having to depend on Western-backed organisations for employment.
The show starts next week, on the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and its producer hopes to tap into the soap opera market that dominates television across the Arab world. The producer of Matabb hopes that humour will set it apart from the competition - because he knows that it will not be distinguished by its production values. The ten-part series had a budget of less than ?100,000. EastEnders can spend that in a single episode.
And it shows. A single camera shoots dialogue between the characters by jutting back and forth, while scenes are clearly filmed on location rather than on specially built sets. But the great virtue of Matabb is that it is unique. Its storyline and in-jokes about life under occupation will appeal to its home audience more than the big-budget soaps from elsewhere in the Arab world, and for outsiders it is well worth a look to learn something about Matabb's particular world.
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