Dar is a lean, handsome, balding fellow, and when I meet him in his Manhattan hotel room, he's eating a cheeseburger and chocolate shake dropped off by a publicist. I observe that he's apparently not keeping kosher, and he just stares at me.

For him, "Ushpizin" is less a religious film than a psychological one. It's about how the mind of the believer -- and let's face it, we all believe in something -- constructs meaning out of what may just be random circumstance. "Shuli saw the movie as taking place in the world of God," he says. "A world where God exists, God guides everything, God sees everything, and God sends you all the signs. My perception is that it's a psychological world, and that's what interested me -- following the way a person chooses to see these signs and ignore others, and form his reality by that.

"You pray for 10 years and get nothing," he goes on. "One day you get something: That's immediately proof of the existence of God. The next day, two guests appear, and this is a world where nothing is coincidental. Therefore this must be another sign. The fact that you know these people, and you know what kind of trouble they're going to bring you, that's not a sign. The sign is that these guys must be a test.

"We're all like that, we're all psychological creatures. We all build our realities out of imaginative worlds. None of us really see reality. Some of us think we do. Some of us think God is reality; some of us think science is reality. I don't think anything is reality; I don't know where reality lies. I like it; I prefer to be like that."

It's pretty clear that Dar personally belongs to the left-leaning, secular segment of Israeli society, but he didn't want to talk about the larger questions of Middle East politics (at least not on the record). But the absence of political debate in "Ushpizin" doesn't mean it's an apolitical film. Making the movie itself was "a political act," he says. "It's being politics, not talking about them."

While the core audience for "Ushpizin" in America will probably be Jewish, Dar specifically hopes that Christians and others will see it. The questions of faith it raises are not "Jewish property," he points out, and as an exercise in boundary-crossing it has a contemporary significance that transcends Israel or Judaism.

"What am I doing here?" he asks rhetorically. "I go into this inaccessible world, this fundamentalist world. I mean, these people go all the way: They are the most radical fundamentalists in the world. Nobody can be more fundamentalist than they are. As much as them, maybe. But not more. They are the most you can imagine. To eternity and beyond, like Buzz Lightyear.

"So I go into this fundamentalist world, and we know nothing about it. All the movies done about it are made from the outside. What I try to do is set all the problems and all the conflict aside for an hour and a half, and just accept their point of view. That's a big trip, I think. It's much more interesting artistically, first of all. And politically and culturally it has a much stronger effect. Because here's something you don't know, something you've never seen before. If you identify with these people and remind yourself that they're actually human beings -- and that besides certain differences in the clothes they are very much like you -- well, that's a better starting point for dialogue than you had before."

This exercise is meant to remind us that whomever we demonize -- whether it's Islamic fundamentalists or born-again Southern Baptists -- are more like us, and therefore more comprehensible, than we generally choose to admit. Without such a perspective, Dar says, "We're heading toward World War III. Actually, we're in it already. And it's only going to get worse."

When I ask if he personally believes in God, I think I'm going to get another of those you're-not-funny stares. Instead, he thinks about it intently for several chews of burger. "I believe in a world that has no answers," he says at last. "There's something interesting in Judaism, and that's the First Commandment, which says, 'I am your God, do not make any pictures of me.' That's exactly the most Jewish thing in the world: Do not make any kind of figuration of God. This addresses the human desire to get an answer to this abyss we stand in front of. It's darkness. We know nothing about it. So in a way, I'm very, very Jewish, because I refuse to give any kind of answer. I am facing nothingness, but in the deepest sense, not in a flat sense."

"Ushpizin" is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. It opens Oct. 28 in Chicago; Nov. 2 in Philadelphia; Nov. 4 in Hartford, Conn., New Haven, Conn., and Providence, R.I.; and Nov. 9 in Baltimore, Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego and Seattle, with many other cities to follow.

Recent Stories