“Our Boys” is a deceptively innocuous title for a powerfully unsettling story.
A coproduction of HBO and Keshet Studios, the 10-part series, debuting Aug. 12, dramatizes the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers by Hamas militants in Israel during the summer of 2014. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, was burned to death and found in a forest outside Jerusalem. The series uses the trappings of a police procedural to tell a politically and emotionally sensitive story, which splits its point of view between Muhammad (Ram Masarweh) and his Palestinian family, and the investigator Simon (Shlomi Elkabetz), who works the case for the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.
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Three creators from disparate backgrounds joined forces to bring “Our Boys” to the screen: Hagai Levi, the Israeli co-creator of Showtime’s “The Affair”; Tawfik Abu Wael, a Palestinian filmmaker (“Last Days in Jerusalem”); and Joseph Cedar, a New York City-born, Israel-raised writer and director (“Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer”).
Although the series is about real-life events within a specific time and place, its exploration of how hate crimes shatter and reverberate throughout a society is depressingly universal.
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