Border Crossings: the New Middle Eastern Cinema

Over the past few years, a new, vibrant cinema has evolved in the Middle East, one that confronts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that’s provocative and politically charged, but also humanistic and entertaining.

Film scholars wrestle with definitional issues like: What constitutes a national cinema? And what are the differences between a film genre and a cycle? I think there is justification to talk about a new Middle Eastern cinema, set on and around borders. Generating this cinema is a cycle of critical yet personal Israeli and Palestinian films that are interrelated in both thematic and aesthetic ways.

While Israel has always had steady film production, Palestinian cinema has emerged against all odds, considering that the region has been under Israel’s military occupation since the 1967 war. The new Israeli films exhibit left-of-center tendencies and are critical of the government line. Moreover, they tackle issues in a fresh way by either collaborating with Palestinian artists, as in The Syrian Bride (2004), or by looking at borders from an unconventional angle, as in Free Zone (2005). While the new Israeli films are overtly critical of the government, the Palestinian ones tend to be more subtle and realistic, situating themselves between melancholy resignation and vigorous resilience.

The new Palestinian and Israeli directors also share greater international visibility. They are invited to showcase their works in such prestigious festivals as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Toronto, giving them not just cachet but an exposure that increases their chances of getting theatrical distribution.

Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) won the jury and Fipresci prizes in Cannes at its world premiere. Timely and relevant, Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) is expected to become a breakthrough film, now that it’s been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the official 2005 Oscar entry from Palestine. Its distributor, Warner Independent Pictures, plans to distribute the film beyond big cities, based on the positive responses at the Berlin Festival, where it won awards, and at the prestigious Telluride and New York festivals. The Syrian Bride has been touring the global festival circuit for over a year, winning more awards than any previous Israeli movie. The film won the Locarno Festival’s Audience Award and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Montreal’s World Film Festival. Avi Mograbi’s controversial documentary, Avenge but One of My Two Eyes (2005), made its world premiere in Cannes and was shown at the New York festival.

By now, the wedding film has become a genre unto itself. Though The Syrian Bride and Rana’s Wedding (2002) are historically and politically specific, they share elements with other films, like Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), that use a single dramatic event, a wedding, to introduce a large gallery of characters whose lives are immediately affected and changed by that ritual.

The Syrian Bride is about physical, mental, and emotional borders, and the risks involved in crossing them. Set on the Israeli-Syrian border in 2000, the film is unmistakably ideological, but its humanism is ultimately more affecting than its didacticism. Taking place in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel, the film depicts the Salm family’s preparations for the wedding of their second-eldest daughter, Mona (Clara Khoury) to Tallel (Derar Sliman), a Syrian TV star. The two have never met; it’s an arranged marriage. Ironically, Mona’s wedding is the saddest day of her life because once she crosses the border, she’ll lose her Israeli residency and will never be allowed to visit her family again. The film deals with political unrest, sexual repression, and patriarchal domination, underlined by the tension between a restrictive tradition and the power of personal realization. The strains of this particular family serve as a microcosm of the identity and political crises facing the Druze and the Middle East over all.

Because of his political tendencies, Hammed (Makram Khoury), the clan’s patriarch, risks arrest if he goes to the border to see Mona off. Conservative and authoritarian, he’s never forgiven his son Hattem (Eyad Sheety) for marrying a Russian; when the couple arrives from Moscow, he refuses to speak to them. Marwan (Ashraf Barhom), Hammed’s other son, a merchant in Italy, is arrested and interrogated at Israel’s airport for his wheeling and dealing, and his girlfriend Jeanne (Julie-Anne Roth) is a Frenchwoman working for the U.N. Then there’s the Jewish notary, who must stamp Mona’s papers, and the Syrian guard, who would rather watch TV than do his job.

Mona’s sister, Amal (Hiam Abbass) is a modern woman who, in defiance of her husband, applies to study social work at the university. At the end, the family, the government, and all those gathered on both sides of the border face an uncertain future in the limbo between Israel and Syria. There’s a ray of hope, as Amal, in the final image, walks proudly toward an unknown yet promising future.

The Syrian Bride is Eran Riklis’s most ambitious film to date. Born in 1954, Riklis has been making films since 1975, including the political thriller On a Clear Day You Can See Damascus (1984) and the acclaimed Cup Final (1991). For years Riklis has traveled to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and The Syrian Bride benefits from his familiarity with the people, the history, and the politics of the Druze culture. His film takes a deep look into a region haunted by hostility, indifference, and bureaucracy. To explore the complex story of women torn between tradition and borders, Riklis chose as collaborator the Palestinian writer Suha Arraf, who is well versed in the Arabic world. This professional union has resulted in a film that crisscrosses the boundary between unwarranted optimism and painful pessimism — what Palestinian writer Emile Habibi has described as “pessoptimism.”

Although The Syrian Bride is not an overt message film, Riklis hopes that it will contribute to greater understanding and tolerance in the Middle East. “I always say that I live in Israel, but I am a filmmaker who doesn’t believe in borders,” Riklis said at the World Film Festival in Montreal. A polylingual venture, The Syrian Bride boasts dialogue in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and French. Some of the actors are Palestinian Israelis, one is a Druze, one French, and one (Hiam Abbass) a Palestinian who lives in France.

In Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding, the title character (played by Clara Khoury) is given an ultimatum by her old-fashioned father, Abu Siad (Zuher Fahoum). She needs to choose by 4 p.m. from his list of acceptable bachelors to marry, or leave with him for Egypt. She opts for neither, frantically running across Jerusalem trying to find and marry her boyfriend, Khalil (Khalifa Natour), a theater director of whom her father disapproves. Bottlenecked streets, armed soldiers, and a funeral impede her journey. No matter which way she turns, Rana runs into brute reality, whether at her aunt’s, where her uncle suffers from an injury sustained in a political demonstration, or on her way to a friend’s, where armed soldiers overreact to her outburst of frustration with a malfunctioning cellphone.

Rana’s journey makes clear that life for ordinary Palestinians has become a welter of pain and dehumanizing violence. Unsaid but implicit is that the same holds true for Israelis, dreading that their next bus ride will go up in flames. It’s a bittersweet film about Palestinian life suffocated by Israeli checkpoints and restrictions. Though her family is Muslim, Rana seems secular, preferring to wear Western clothing. Unlike her lover Khalil, who works in Ramallah, where roadblocks pose a daily hardship, she lives a relatively sheltered life in Jerusalem. Her father’s ultimatum makes her more defiant and conscious of the deep quagmire that defines Israeli-Palestinian relations.

In Paradise Now, Abu-Assad meets the difficult challenge of showing suicide bombers in a compassionate, sympathetic light. Viewers who may never have encountered such screen characters before may find themselves feeling unexpectedly and uncomfortably close to them, thanks in part to the film’s appealing actors. It’s a testament to the film’s balanced tone that, no matter what your politics are, you’ll be absorbed in a tale that walks a fine line between political thriller and psychological drama.

The story follows two childhood friends who have been recruited for a terrorist strike on Tel Aviv, embarking on what may be their last 48 hours. In the West Bank city of Nablus, where daily life grinds on amid crushing poverty and rocket blasts, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), auto mechanics stuck in dead-end jobs, have been chosen for the mission as a team, based on their conviction and loyalty to each other. A meeting with Suha (Lubna Azabal), a progressive woman with moderate political views, serves as the story’s catalyst. Upon discovery of their plan, Suha precipitates a moral crisis that forces each man to reconsider his action and its implications for those around him.

We often read about suicide attacks in newspapers, but Abu-Assad succeeds in dramatizing this complex situation in a realistic and emotionally satisfying way. Though fictional, the script, which he wrote with Bero Beyer, is based on interrogation transcripts of suicide bombers who failed, various official reports, and interviews with people who knew bombers — friends and families, particularly mothers.

Exploring similar themes with more artistry and humor, Suleiman’s seriocomic Divine Intervention is a political allegory unfolding in deadpan sketches that recall the theater of the absurd. The anecdotes are loosely hung on the story of a Jerusalem filmmaker (Suleiman), who visits his dying father in a Nazareth hospital on his way to Ramallah to meet his lover (Manal Khader) at the Al-Ahram checkpoint that separates them. Once they meet, they sit in their car, holding hands and watching the frustrated travelers and soldiers play out the tragicomedy of occupation. With a blank expression, Suleiman observes the craziness around him, filming a series of border disputes and confrontations between belligerent neighbors. The camera uses static long shots to view silent-movie gags in the modern world. While anger and frustration are inherent in the comedy, Suleiman never divides his characters into heroes and villains. The decades-long antagonism has become a status quo to be accepted or rejected, and the film, like its title, straddles the line between hope and fantasy in envisioning a resolution.

Past and present, history and myth collide in Mograbi’s provocative documentary, Avenge but One of My Two Eyes, which draws controversial parallels between Jewish historical tales and the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Born and educated in Israel, Mograbi studied philosophy and art before pursuing a film career. His work is reflexive and polemical in the way that Godard’s films were during his Maoist era. A peace activist, Mograbi was sent to jail by the army in 1982, when he refused to serve in Lebanon.

In Avenge, Mograbi shows how Israel has taken episodes from its history and reconstructed them as potent myths in its secular ideology. Specifically, the film explores Israel’s rituals dedicated to the memory of its national heroes, the Masada Zealots who committed suicide rather than live under Roman occupation, and Samson, who asked God to let him avenge but one of his two eyes by bringing down the Philistine temple on himself and the jeering crowds who had imprisoned and blinded him.

The narrative is punctuated by one long phone conversation between Mograbi and a Palestinian friend who complains about the mistreatment of his people. Mograbi’s unblinking cameras follow the inhuman treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli military, suggesting they are driven to the kind of despair in which no act of protest is too radical. Scenes of Israeli soldiers preventing Palestinian passage to Jerusalem illustrate the callousness of Ariel Sharon’s policies. An injured woman is refused access to a hospital. Mograbi presents his homeland’s treatment of its Muslim neighbors at border checkpoints as oppressive acts of subjugation comparable to the Romans’ strategy to enclose the Jews within a high wall on the Masada hilltop, just as he depicts Israel’s exaltation of Samson’s martyrdom as similar to Palestinians’ belief in suicide bombing as a reasonable means of revolt.

Amos Gitai’s Free Zone is also about crossing borders, both physical and mental. Structurally, it’s a road film since most of the “action” is set within a car driving from Jerusalem to Jordan. Innovative stylistically, Free Zone shows women’s subjective memories through layers of superimposed images, instead of the more conventional flashbacks, suggesting that the women’s past is integral to the way they perceive the present.

Rebecca (Natalie Portman) is a young American with an Israeli father and non-Jewish mother, which according to Jewish law makes her non-Jewish, and yet she feels Jewish. The first scene is audacious: a long close-up in front of the Wailing Wall — remnant of the sacred ancient temple — of Rebecca sobbing in a taxi that is driven by Hanna (Hanna Laslo). Rebecca has just broken up with her Israeli soldier boyfriend and has no place to go. She persuades Hanna to take her along, and the two drive to one of Jordan’s “free zones” to collect money owed to Hanna’s husband Moshe, who can’t go himself because he is recovering from wounds suffered in a Jerusalem bomb explosion. The designated economic free zones are a kind of no man’s land with no customs or taxes. People from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Israel go there to sell and buy cars, despite the countries’ deep diplomatic tensions. In the free zone, the women meet Leila (Hiam Abbass), a Palestinian who is reserved, elegant, and respectful.

The three women represent national types that embody different political and personal values. Hanna, the Israeli, is strong, charismatic, and a bit of a bully. Gitai said at Cannes that these are “characteristics of Israelis, who are overbearing but sincere, and it also sums up everything that I like and resent about Israelis.” He said that “the film is a portrait of myself; I’m not different from my people.”

At one point the women, despite divergent interests and personalities, sit together in Hanna’s car in this geographic pocket of freedom, connected through routine, not political, activities, and they sing together the melody on the radio. It’s a vision of female empowerment and camaraderie. While men conduct the military conflicts, women are the real heroes, enduring their roles as wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of soldiers, the wounded, the heartbroken, and the dead.

In the climax of Divine Intervention, a balloon bearing Yasir Arafat’s grinning mug floats past an Israeli checkpoint and over Jerusalem. “There’s a balloon trying to get through. Can we shoot it down?” a soldier asks his commanding officer. Even more absurd is a strange David and Goliath showdown between a line of Israeli gunmen and a paper target that becomes a flying Ninja warrior à la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In the last act of The Syrian Bride, political conflict’s banality and the mindless bureaucracy are depicted through the farcical attempts of a Red Cross worker to gain Israeli and Syrian cooperation for Mona’s wedding-day passage from the Israeli side of the border to the Syrian side.

Though Paradise Now is mostly somber, even it displays some poignant humor. The martyrs offer their video statements holding guns. As they passionately declare their wish to die for freedom, the recruiter happily munches on a sandwich. One of the bombers fumbles his lines time and again, and a crew member forgets to turn on the camera, forcing more takes.

The sequence, like the new Middle Eastern cinema in general, offers much-needed existential-humanist perspective, poignant yet humorous, on strife with no solution in sight.

Emanuel Levy is a film scholar, critic, and visiting professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. His books include All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards (Continuum, 2003), and a biography of Vincente Minnelli, Painting With Light, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 14, Page B14