CAMBRIDGE - Eran Kolirin was fidgety.
Dressed in a striped T-shirt and corduroy jacket, he slouched among pillows of red velvet, gold plush, and leopard-print that served as his platform for explaining the small phenomenon that his 2007 film "The Band's Visit" has become.
The hotel room where he held forth "looks like a Spanish brothel with all this red," he said, but the level of contrast seemed somehow fitting for a man whose film sets down an Egyptian police band in the middle of an Israeli desert town.
The movie, which opens here Friday, has been nominated for some two dozen international awards - though no Oscars - winning eight Israeli Film Academy Awards including best film, among other prizes.
The band's formal title is Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Led by the knotted-up Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), the group arrives prepared to help open an Arab Culture Center. But miscommunications land them in the wrong place: dusty Bet Hatikva, whose attractions comprise a tiny roller rink, a fluorescent-lit falafel joint, and a roadside café so sunbeaten its shutters threaten to fall off.
Its sensuous owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), blazes out of the dull surroundings. She insists on welcoming the stranded travelers for the night, particularly Tewfiq, to whom she is clearly drawn. The bandleader, his right-hand man Simon (Khalifa Natour), and would-be Casanova, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) skate along cultural boundaries with their hosts, tentatively making connections.
However, describe "Band's Visit" as a clash of cultures, and the director cringes. He never intended to make a political movie, he says; he simply wanted to explore a vivid image that came to him in 1999. One night before bed, Kolirin says, he imagined a member of an Egyptian police band performing:
"He sings, and his song is like very old and heartbreaking in complete contrast to his uniform."
That disjunction runs through the movie. A janitor ruins a photo of the band when he trudges in front of them. Itzik (Rubi Moscovish), an Israeli television host, talks about loneliness during a scene in his child's bedroom.
Both visually and thematically, the film "is all about this kind of collision between the formality and the informality," Kolirin said.
A comedy-drama, the movie gets much of its humor from watching the musicians - clad in baby-blue uniforms - wander bewildered through empty landscapes.
Kolirin used plentiful amounts of Arabic and American music to knit the two sides together and illustrate feelings the characters can't express. In one scene, three of the band's musicians bond with their hosts by singing the American jazz standard "Summertime." In another, Simon, a clarinetist, plays the overture to a concerto he never finished writing. Khaled flirts by asking women if they like Chet Baker.
Still, communication between people and yes, cultures, remains an underlying theme.
Kolirin, 34, says that as a child he watched Egyptian melodramas on Friday afternoon Israeli TV, sometimes followed by a performance of the Israeli broadcasting authority's classical Arab orchestra a memory he gives to the character Dina to retell. Despite the tensions between the two countries, he recalls that Egypt's art had a place in Israeli culture.
"I think that there is a very strong kind of connection between the Jews and the Arabic in the movie, and it's part of this schizophrenia in Israel," Kolirin said. "There is a part of us which is Arab."
Ironically, it was communication issues that knocked the film out of Oscar contention. Within their ethnic groups, the characters speak Arabic or Hebrew; across them, they speak English. With over half the dialogue in English, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to allow "The Band's Visit" in the foreign-language category.
After initial anger, "I stopped caring," Kolirin shrugged. "I can say a book is 200 pages with sentences with commas and dots. . . but I wouldn't be saying anything about the book.
"It's not my job; it has nothing to do with me," he said of the snub.
Despite the controversy and charged political context, "The Band's Visit" remains a resolutely small movie. Kolirin shies away from specifying what he wants audiences to take away. The movie's opening titles say, "Not many remember this. It was not very important."
Sara Rubin, executive director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, saw the movie in Paris and regretted that she was unable to get it for the festival. "It was realistic, but it was also really sweet," she said. Commending the acting in particular. she said, "I think it's a terrific first feature."
For a debut film, "The Band's Visit" has garnered rare attention. (Kolirin had previously directed only a made-for-TV movie and several TV show episodes.) The movie won a special jury prize at Cannes in addition to the Israeli Film Academy awards. However, Kolirin says the effort he has poured into promoting the film internationally for the last year has pushed ideas for new projects out of his head. On the way to Cannes people told him to make up a new film even if he didn't have one, he says. "So for a while I was lying about it."
On his current publicity trip, he says he read a book while at a stop in Portland, Ore., and found himself inspired. He bought a notebook and pen to jot it all down, but, sadly, the pen turned out to be a marker. "So I didn't write, and probably I'll never write again," he joked.
Still, he says, though he has missed his wife and young son in Tel Aviv during his travels on behalf of his film, "talk about drowning in the butter, the milk, the cream . . . the world opens."
Or at least its interiors do. "I don't get to see any city. I'm only in the hotel," he said. That night, he hoped to leave his plush surroundings at Hotel Marlowe and cross the river into Boston.
