pickle-makers

\”Pickles, Inc.\” is an unpretentious PBS documentary about eight Arab widows from a village in northern Israel, who break all kinds of traditions by starting a tiny factory producing homemade pickles.\n\nAs modest as it seems, \”Pickles,\” which airs Tuesday, Aug. 30 at 9 p.m. on KCET, can be viewed on surprisingly varied levels: as part of the recent trend by Israeli filmmakers to explore sympathetically the daily lives of their Arab countrymen; as the struggle of Arab women to stir against generations of submission by testing the boundaries of their independence; as a portrayal of the joys and pitfalls facing novices trying to start their own small business.\n\nFinally — and this matters, too — the film provides a bit of lighthearted news from a land of generally shrieking and frequently depressing, doom-saying headlines.