Palestine
theartsdesk
The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out the crime took place exactly 25 years before her birth, she determines to visit the archives to find out as much as she can about the girl and the case as possible – but for that, she needs to travel out of the West Bank. The journey is not far in miles, but as a Palestinian it is not straightforward.–––––I call the author of the article, an Israeli journalist, and try to pass myself off as a self-confident person Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year after the mass expulsion mourned as the Nakba in Arabic in which around 700,000 Palestinians permanently fled their homes. It follows a senior military officer in charge of reconnaissance. After days of searching among the dunes, his patrol eventually comes across a group of Bedouins at a spring. After the patrol guns down the men and their camels, the commander brings the girl who has survived the slaughter back Read more ...
Tom Baily
First-time collaborators Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell have tried to divert from the standard media narrative by looking at Gaza from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. The result is an observant documentary that attempts to avoid politics by collecting first-hand portraits, or what the directors call a “tapestry of characters”. Honesty, candour and hope abound, but hostility is never far away.There is a free-floating and casual mood to this film. The creators’ mission is clear: to sit back and let the people speak. For most of the film, we witness the ordinary, often mundane details of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot uses irony and visual poetry to condemn his nation’s militarism. Twenty months after the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, it opens in the UK trailing a divisive history. When it first emerged in 2017, it was condemned as un-Israeli by then culture minister Miri Regev. She was subsequently barred from the ceremony for the Ophir awards (the Israeli Oscars), at which Foxtrot won eight prizes, including Best Picture.The film was designed as a triptych. The first section focuses on the grief of a well-to-do Tel Aviv couple, Michael and Daphna (Lior Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a rogue spy adopting a role to infiltrate a network and bring it down from within. There the overlap ended. Where The Night Manager exerted a vice-like grip, The Little Drummer Girl has caused much scratching of heads. Twitter's one-word review was “Huh?”So there was much audience depletion. By halfway through the series had haemorrhaged more than 40 Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a father-son relationship lies in understanding the full nuance of its title. The word wajib, best translated from Arabic as “social duty”, is spoken only once in the film – an invitation is taken to an old lady whom the hosts know will be unable to attend, but they offer it because that is the accepted, the proper way in their society – but its concept pervades the entire film.Jacir has located her story Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Maen, a member of the rap collective Sa’aleek, was working one night in their small makeshift studio in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He dozed off, only to find the studio door had been concreted over and he was trapped. It took fellow band members 36 hours to dig him out, but Maen didn't seem that worse for wear. As studio disaster anecdotes go, that takes some beating... Palestinian musicians tell you of many difficulties, not just anarchic building in the camps, notably that there are at least eight different travel documents, allowing different rights of movement. One Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mary Magdalene’s story hasn’t suddenly become the second greatest ever told, despite its radical expansion here. Garth Davis’s follow-up to Lion is, though, a profoundly thoughtful and convincing telling of the Christian main event. This Mary (Rooney Mara) is an interventionist, outsider witness to Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix), seeing his ministry from fresh, oblique angles. Stumbling almost into the path of a bloody Christ collapsing under his cross’s weight has documentary shock, while his words sound fresh-minted. The millennia-old sexism which has calcified major religions is meanwhile plucked Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem. Anton Sansour, a mathematician, academic and his partner’s father, jokes that all the fruit – from apricots to lemons – grows in his garden, while the seasonings traditionally arrived in town, on camel trains, along the ancient spice route from the East. This calorific symbol of “goodwill and fellow- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Soaring over an expanse of blue sea, a white bird traverses the screen diagonally. Gliding unhindered through the air, it is the embodiment of freedom; by contrast, the movement of people down below is constrained by border crossings and passport controls. The perfect tranquility of this opening shot is the calm before the storm; prepare to spend the next two hours witnessing extremes of human misery and, by turns, feeling horrified, angry and deeply depressed.A boat comes into view, chugging in the opposite direction. Overloaded with refugees making their way across the Mediterranean to the Read more ...