If there are two films in the festival that should be seen as a total viewing experience, it is this documentary and dramatic feature that both take place in the holy city of Jerusalem.

With homosexuality considered an especially grievous and terrible sin, both films tackle the subject with an assured hand. Yun Suh's documentary “;City of Borders”; uses the now-closed gay bar Shushan as a gathering point for her subjects: the Israeli bar owner who is also a harassed city council member, and whose patrons include a young Palestinian drag queen who secretly climbs the dividing wall between his people and the Jews to go to the club, an Israeli who wants to be a settler in the occupied territory with his partner and, more intriguingly, a lesbian couple, one Jewish and the other a Palestinian who lives with her partner in the Jewish west side of the city.

Suh does a great job intertwining all of their stories and showing all of the terribly complicated aspects of their lives as they attempt to balance the demands of their ethnic and cultural heritage with their outlaw sexuality, as expressed in the friendly confines of the club and out on the streets during a pride parade.

There's a telling moment in the film when Samira, the Palestinian woman, tells of the first time she and her partner, Ravit, had sex. It felt to Samira at first like an angry political act—“;f—-ing the occupation”;—that then evolved into an act of mutual and lasting love.

That unexpected and dangerous love is also expressed in Haim Tabakman's sparse and elegant debut feature. A gay yeshiva (university) student, after failing to woo a fellow student who moved to Jerusalem, takes solace and finds love with a respected ultra-Orthodox family man who he finds shelter and work at the man's butcher shop.

At first the family man resists the student's advances, welcoming it as a strengthening challenge to his faith, but then warms to this lustful temptation and finds himself enlivened by the young man's sexual vibrancy. But the more time they spend together in secret, the more his wife and the strict community suspect what's happening. The family man ultimately returns to the foundation of his faith and family, but at what cost? “;Eyes Wide Open”; is a sympathetic and moving film to see.