Coming soon?

Saw a preview for "The Visitor", in which Hiam Abbas has a role. She played Amal in "The Syrian Bride", and did an excellent job, so I'm thinking that I'll probably check it out if it comes to the new Landmark Theatre that opened on the east side of the harbor.

The Syrian Bride

I watched a very good movie last night, The Syrian Bride. Set in the Golan Heights, it follows the fictional wedding day of a Druze woman who is marrying by arrangement a Syrian cousin. Once she crosses into Syria, though, she will never be permitted to return.

The small scale dramas are all about her family: her sister Amal, who is trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage; her brother Marwan, a very slick guy engaged in "business" (I assume smuggling or something black/grey market); her brother Hattem, who married a Russian woman and was disowned; and her father Hammed, a political dissent recently released from prison, who is caught between the political/religious elders, Israeli security, and his family.

The larger issues are political, of course. Israeli bureaucrats create a special stamp just for Mona's passport, which the Syrian border guards cannot by law accept because of the dispute about the ownership/nationality of the Golan. The UN person is utterly frustrated by the attempt to be an intermediary between the two, ultimately abandoning the situation in order to catch her flight home to France. So Mona is left sitting in no man's land, not permitted to go back home (her passport had been stamped with the exit stamp already, you see) but not allowed to enter Syria.

The dialogue varied between Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, English and French. Sadly, I grasped much more of the scant Russian dialogue with my defunct Russian than I did of the Arabic. Most of the Arabic I caught was numbers, greetings, nouns and verbs; just words, random shards of dialogue.

So far behind

It's been too long between classes and my laziness has caught up with me. I'm so far behind and floundering in this next class that I probably would've been better to repeat the last one before moving on. Ouch.

Random information: watched The Kingdom last week. Not really impressed with the movie as a whole. Could catch numbers and a few words in Arabic -- greetings, thanks, etc. Was very impressed by Ashraf Barhoum.