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A Palestinian wedding
Montreal World Film Festival has become a showcase for art films. ‘Reflections of Our Time’ was one of the sections amongst the twelve categories at the festival, held recently in Canada. There were more than 85 films in this section this year. Rana’s Wedding: Jerusalem, Another Day a Palestine/Netherlands co-production was one of them.
The film by Hany Abu-Assad, who has produced several documentaries for BBC and Channel 4 in England, was shown to fully packed houses. All the six shows were completely sold out.
Rana’s Wedding is a simple, uncomplicated, down-to-earth story told in a matter-of-fact style about life in an area riddled with conflict. Technically and artistically it is not a great film. Abu-Assad has used the camera to record the day-to-day reality of a people ravaged by war. The entire film was shot on location in East-Jerusalem and Ramallah. The time period is just before the Israeli army moved into Palestinian territories.
The film is a romantic drama and a documentary at the same time. Through the medium of cinema, following Rana’s search for her boyfriend, Hany Abu-Assad shows the reality of life for ordinary Arabs in a bitterly divided city. The subtitle, Jerusalem, Another Day is revealing and the story is symbolic.
Rana, a young, strong-willed Palestinian woman leaves her father’s house early in the morning to find her boyfriend, Khalil. Her father who is against her marrying Khalil, a theatre director, has threatened to take her to Egypt with him that day at 4:00 p.m. unless she gets married before the deadline. He wants her to choose a husband from a long list of eligible men he has prepared. The list is impressive: doctors, engineers, lawyers.
There is only one problem, Rana does not know any one of them personally and she loves Khalil. She also does not want to go to Egypt. Her life is in East-Jerusalem and that is where she wants to be. To continue living there, Rana has to find Khalil, marry him and present her father with a fait accompli. She has to do all this in 10 hours. As she sets out on her search, she is confronted with one hurdle after another. Eventually, she finds Khalil in a theatre in Ramallah and marries him.
Rana wanders through the chaotic, war-torn city on foot and by taxi. She goes through road blocks, security checks, angry demonstrations, bulldozers demolishing houses, people throwing stones and bullets flying. Through her fears, and doubts, we get a sense of the fear, anxiety and uncertainty in the daily lives of people in the area. In comparison, the normal desire of a woman to find her boyfriend, get married, and all the fussing around the wedding preparation appear banal. As Hany Abu-Assad has said, “When the abnormality of barriers and occupation becomes an everyday reality, love and marriage turn into fiction. This is life in Palestine now.”
The listing at Cannes described the movie as “fairly balanced, with empathy for the Jews as well as its Palestinian protagonists.”
Abu-Assad has said, “In this film I felt that reality was dictating me. It became a bloody fight between reality and fiction, in a country where the normal appears to be absurd and the absurd appears to be normal, I realized this fight had to be a fair one and that in order to win I had to stay honest!”
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