Filed under: Cinemático
Several weeks ago, I got to see The Syrian Bride again at a screening at MIT on the occasion of International Women’s Day. I realized that I didn’t blog about the movie when I first got it through Netflix nearly two years ago, but it’s an utterly remarkable movie that deserves mention here–if only to ask people to see it, if you haven’t already. The story is set entirely on the wedding day of Mona the bride, who nonetheless plays a relatively smaller role in the film. The rightful protagonist is the elder sister Amal, played by the preeminent Hiam Abbas–who many of you will recognize from Paradise Now. In fact, much of the cast should be familiar if you’ve seen a handful of Israeli/Palestinian movies. While I think the strongest message of the film is in its critique of the nation-state system and the modern bureaucracy, it offers a rich portrait of this Druze family that simultaneously explores big and complex questions of religion, culture, and politics. The theme of gender emerges as cutting across all of these. With a great balance between serious drama and a memorable sense of humor, the film affects in mutiple and uncertain ways, even as the remarkably powerful ending leaves you in helpless melancholy.
