ihath

I am reminded of the game my husband and I play when I am mad at him.

I will put on my longest most serious face, and he will frequently do everything in his power to make me smile.

Funny faces, jokes, tickles, he knows that once I smile I won’t be able to pretend that I am mad at him anymore. When all else fails, he will say:
Za’atarah: Don’t be like that.
ihath: like what?
Za’atarah: Like a grumpy person who won’t smile even when he is presented with warm freshly baked bread.

The last statement always conjures up in my mind Za’atarah’s stories about how his mother always got up at 5 am every morning to bake fresh bread for the whole family.

Every Palestinian man seems to have a story about how his mother sacrificed herself in hopes that he would have a better life.

It must have been nice to get freshly baked bread every single morning. Only a true grump would not find a reason to smile.

These thoughts play in my mind as I conjure up the movie Paradise Now that I watched during the International Film Festival.

Saeed is asked to smile by a photographer. The photographer insists, Saeed persists in his refusal to smile. Meet Saeed, a young man living in Nablus in the occupied territories.

Ironically, Saeed means happy in Arabic.

While I spent time in occupied territories, I could always tell the difference between the locals and the foreigners. The ones the grew up there and the ones that were visiting. The local ones rarely, if ever smiled. The ones visiting from abroad smiled liberally, when greeting you, when saying goodbye, when talking about something funny and for no reason at all.

Meet Suha, she smiles lots. Guess what? … she grew up in France. People are nice to her because she is the daughter of a martyr and a hero, also she is cute.

In a Hollywood movie, Suha would make Saeed smile by the end of the movie, at one point you think that surly the movie is going in that direction.

So many similarities with a Hollywood movie

There is a cute leading female.
Two guys dressed in a black suits, which reminded me of the Men In Black movie and the Blues Brothers movie.
Suspense.

One quarter into the movie the suspense was so high, that my friend who came to see the movie with me looked like she couldn’t take it. I offered to hold her hand. For about five minutes we both forgot about the north American rule that females are not supposed to hold hands in public and behaved like we would in the middle east despite the fact that my friend is not middle eastern, we held hands. She looked at me and whispered, you must find this even more distressing than I do, I nodded with my head to say that I am ok. I wanted to tell her that everything in this movie is familiar, the language, the mentality, the way people talk, I have seen it all before, only in real life. It must be distressing to be exposed to all this within 15 minutes.

My favorite scene in the Blues Brothers is when they are going around looking for the other members of their band. They knock on a door and a lady with hair curlers opens the doors. She looks at the two men wearing black suits and asks them
lady in hair curlers: Are you guys with the FBI?
Blues Brothers: No Ma’am. We are on a mission from God. We are musicians.

That scene cracks me up each time I see it.

Saeed and his friend are not sure if they are on a mission from god or not. When they discuss the nature of their mission, they don’t seem sure if god is behind it or not. You wish they were religious crazy fanatics on a mission from god …… that is the lie that we have been told in western media, time and again ….. surprise! …… they are not. Religion plays a role ….. but a very small role in the events that are about to take place.

Paradise Now is not a Hollywood movie

No happy ending
No violence
No car chase scene
No sex
One small brief episode of swearing and it is very brief indeed

As I watched the movie, I wished I could have reach out to Saeed to shake his shoulder. I wished I could tell him, “Saeed! you are young and beautiful, your whole life is ahead of you, don’t throw it away”. Suha tries hard to play the audience voice in that movie. She even speaks Arabic with a funny accent to mark her foreignness and out-sidedness. She is treated with polite decorum, but nothing she says seems to address the realities on the ground. She is there in person, but far removed at the same time.

When the movie ended there was complete silence in the whole movie theater. You could have heard a pin drop. In most movies, you can hear the tidbits of conversation about the movie as you walk out. Again, as we walked out, there was complete and stunned silence. Nobody was saying anything, not even to their mobile phone. Everybody was completely and utterly stunned by the movie and so overwhelmed with what they just saw they were speechless.

I had seen several movies in this years International Film Festival, not as many as I would have liked to because I was busy with other things. But this movie made the International Festival for me. After I watched it, I had no desire to see any moremovies, this one will live with me for a long time.

In short, absolutely brilliant. If you are planning to see it, prepare to see a truly thought provoking movie that will rock your world.

There is a way between voice and presence where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens. With wandering talk it closes. .... Rumi