Focus: Films from the Middle East
Muslim cadences, echoing at sunrise on their distinctly quavering pitches, rise up in three especially notable documentaries at the festival. All are worth seeing if only to better familiarize oneself with a culture and part of the world that our government, despite its denials, can’t help but demonize. Baghdad On/Off (4 p.m. May 2 & 1:30 p.m. May 4) follows its filmmaker, Saad Salman, on the perilous road southward from the Syrian border to the city. Returning to his country to visit his dying mother after 30 years of exile in France, Salman presents a people terrified by the regime but also wearied by years of foreign embargo, personal humiliation and loss. The countryside, always under shocking blue skies, alternately resembles a wasteland and a paradise—just as the journey accommodates a richness of near-surreal oddities: children clapping at a Saddam puppetshow; a fluorescent-lit shopping center filled with new luggage and TVs, its chador-wrapped patrons drifting down the aisles to the piped-in strains of Billy Joel’s “Honesty.” Through Salman’s cracked windshield, thousands go about the duty of survival; what now for them?
Thierry Michel’s ambitious Iran: Veiled Appearances (2 p.m. & 7 p.m. April 29), a Sundance film, captures with impressive evenhandedness a citizenry poised between orthodoxy and the far-from-dominant modernizing impulse. Though it begins with bitter eulogies at an executed poet’s funeral and ends with a strangely euphoric scene of paragliding women, in between are stunning images of the millions swarming and fainting in Tehran’s streets during Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral: “Those were difficult and beautiful days,” says one testifier, still moved like many to regularly visit Khomeini’s tomb and kiss the steel gate around it. Perseverance, tradition and doubt also suffuse A Wedding in Ramallah (9:30 p.m. April 30 & 5:30 p.m. May 1), about two Palestinian women arranged into unions with countrymen living in America. One bride is invited overseas to a dull, housebound existence in Cleveland; the other is left behind. “God curse America,” she spits bitterly. “It takes everything but gives nothing back.” To witness such sentiments, not from terrorists but from the mouths of ordinary people the warlords sometime call “civilian casualties,” is to attach a human face to the global crisis of our time.
—J.H.R.
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