Palestinian film awarded the best Arab film in 2017
Nisaa FM: - Back in 2004, Filmmaker Magazine named the Palestinian writer and director Annemarie Jacir as one of the “25 new faces of independent cinema”, after releasing a handful of short films to wide acclaim. Since then, Jacir has collected dozens of accolades from film festivals around the world, including Cannes and Berlin, as well as achieving worldwide recognition.
Her 2017-release "Wajib" was at the 14th International Film Festival at Dubai on 13 December voted to the best Arab film of the year.
Comic and relatable portrayal of a father-son relationship in newest film
Annemarie Jacir’s 2017-release, Wajib ('Duty’), is a darkly comic and relatable portrayal of a father-son relationship. Saleh Bakri plays Shadi, a Palestinian architect living in Italy. Shadi must return home to Nazareth in the run-up to his sister’s wedding, when he and his father, Abu Shadi (played by Saleh Bakri’s own father Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri) partake in the traditional duty of hand delivering wedding invitations to hundreds of friends and relatives. The film is a roadmovie with most of the action taking place inside the car, or in the eclectic and often eccentric households visited by the father and his estranged son.
Enduring past tensions between the pair are revived, such as Abu Shadi’s disdain for Shadi’s relationship, job, and gaudy fashion sense. These tensions are relatable to anyone with a parent or child, and make for many comic moments, being perhaps Jacir’s funniest film yet. However, they also highlight the persisting tensions felt between Palestinians living inside Israel and Palestine, and in the diaspora–of being caught between preserving traditions as a form of resistance to the brutal occupation, and being a forward-thinking and productive population.
The release proves that Annemarie Jacir’s films are as poignant and relevant as ever. Wajib was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and deservedly, Wajib was chosen as the Palestinian entry for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s Annemarie Jacir’s third film to do so.
Annemarie Jacir’s international career with Palestinian focus
Annemarie Jacir has been working in independent cinema since 1998 and has written, directed and produced a number of award-winning films. Furthermore her poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and she has won several screenwriting awards.
Born in 1974 to a Palestinian Christian family, Jacir grew up in a modest household in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She completed her Masters in Film at Columbia University in New York City and subsequently began writing and directing short films. Her 2003 mockumentary-style short, 'Like Twenty Impossibles’, was a bleak but poetic depiction of life under occupation, centring entirely on one Palestinian film crew’s encounter with Israeli forces at a West Bank checkpoint. The film picked up a series of awards, and was included in the official selection at Cannes that year.
Her 2008 feature-length debut, 'Salt of this Sea’, tells the story of Soraya, a Palestinian woman born and bred in Brooklyn. Soraya returns to her grandfather’s native Jaffa and tries to exchange some of his old coins. Soraya’s coins are rejected, and in a dramatic turn, she robs the bank for the amount she, her grandfather, and in essence her people, are owed. Jacir’s talents lie in using the fictional form to focus on deeply realistic portrayals of everyday people, who then fall into extraordinary situations.
This magical blending of escapist fantasy and gritty reality is also a prominent feature of her 2012 film, 'When I Saw You’. The film depicts a mother and son living alone together in the Harir Refugee Camp in Jordan in the wake of the 1967 war, which left 300,000 Palestinians displaced. The son, Tarek, runs away and finds himself adopted by a group of self-governing Palestinian militants living in the desert. His mother, in an attempt to find him, gets swept up into the group of rebels. The film brings magic to the bleak reality of displacement and stagnant refugee camps. At the same time, the tender and at times comic portrayal of a mother trying to protect her son is deeply relatable, and the mixture of humour and warmth against a backdrop of an all-too-real story of hardship is a signature of Jacir’s work.
Source: www.theculturetrip.com and www.middleeasteye.net