22 October 2008

Review

BOURJ AL-BARAJNEH: The repetitive clacking emitted by the borrowed projector was at times louder than the volume of the film it was projecting, and the sugar-infused youngsters darting about proved challenging distractions to the audience. Nevertheless, "The Salt of This Sea," Annemarie Jacir's feature film debut, premiered in glorious 35-mm at the Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp on Monday evening, before a more-or-less capacity audience in the main hall of the Palestinian Arab Center.

The film screened courtesy of Ayam Beirut al-Cinemaiya, Beirut's festival of independent Arabic-language film, where it enjoyed its Lebanon debut two nights earlier. Herself a member of the Palestinian refugee community, Jacir's choice of venue for this third screening was as self-evidently political as the human predicament framing the film's narrative - military occupation and colonialism and the barriers these erect between people and the possibility of normal human interaction.

Since its world premiere as part of the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section earlier this year, the film's contentious back-story of Israeli occupation has given at least one American critic an opportunity to dismiss the film as didactic. The implication is that by making a film that speaks to the political specifics of Palestine's occupation, she has sacrificed aesthetics to activism.

"Salt of This Sea" is a poetic reflection upon occupation, which - whether they like it or not - leaves its residents politically pre-occupied. Insofar as the dislocation and alienation the film depicts are not exclusive to Palestine, this politicized aesthetic is as universal as that of the most mundane love story.

Thuraya, the character at the center of "Salt of This Sea," is a Lebanese-born Palestinian-American from Brooklyn who uses her father's inheritance to travel to Palestine. For audiences accustomed to protagonists who are fully sympathetic characters, she is a challenging figure.

Her character (energetically depicted by performance poet Suheir Hammad) mingles elements of entitlement - fwhich some might say is an integral part of an American upbringing - and self-righteous outrage - the inheritance of a 60-year-old disinheritance.

The mission Thuraya has assigned herself while in Palestine underlines her naivete. In 1948, her grandfather had deposited his life savings in the Jaffa branch of the British-Palestine Bank, left behind in the family's haste to leave. So, 60 years later, she goes to the Ramallah branch of the same bank to withdraw it on his behalf.

It doesn't takes long for Thuraya to become disenchanted with the bourgeois Ramallah that has coalesced around the Palestinian Authority's (PA) nominal sovereignty.

While dining at a posh restaurant, a Palestinian businessman asks her why she'd want to come here when it's so clearly better overseas. She then finds that a comfortable Ramallah apartment is well beyond her means. Finally, there is the matter of the bank.

The bank's Palestinian manager tells her the accounts of the Jaffa branch were frozen when the country was lost in 1948. When she later tells the British regional manager that his bank is responsible for her father's savings, he tells her, "If you want money, you can apply for a loan like anyone else. There's no need for stunts and dramatic stories."

Thuraya's alienation corresponds with her falling in with Emad (Saleh Bakri), whom she first notices working as a waiter in the posh Ramallah restaurant.

Emad is at once a foil and a love interest. Like her, his family comes from a town that now lies within the state of Israel - Dawayma, the site of a notorious 1948 massacre. But while she has spent her entire life overseas and has always dreamed of coming to Palestine, Emad has been denied a permit that would allow him to walk in the sea for 17 years and is waiting for his visa to leave for Canada - where a full university scholarship awaits him.

Thuraya applies for Palestinian residency, only to find that, because her family is from Jaffa (in Israel "proper"), the PA is unable to recognize her Palestinian status. In need of money, she takes a job at Emad's restaurant, only to find that Palestinian workers can go months without being paid.

The couple are sacked, and Emad reveals that his visa application to Canada (his fourth) has been rejected. He and Thuraya find they have reached the same point of alienation by different means.

With nothing much to lose - and with the Ramallah branch of the British-Palestine Bank clearly solvent - Thuraya, Emad and their friend Marwan (Riyad Ideis) decide to pull a heist. They don heavy Palestinian/Muslim headgear and make off with the appropriate sum (made easier by Palestinian security guards' being prohibited to carry guns).

They then hide from the Palestinian authorities by crossing - with surprising ease, it must be said - into Palestine disguised as yarmulke-wearing Israeli Jews. Once inside Israel, the trio do the things they've been forbidden up to then - visiting the sea, then Thuraya's family house.

It is now occupied by Irit (Shelly Goral), a left-leaning Israeli Jew who invites the three in, saying they can stay as long as they like. She and Marwan hit it off immediately, to the point that he decides to stay with her. For Thuraya, though, the visit is such a wrenching experience she finds it impossible to be as open and friendly as her host.

She says she wants to buy back the house. Irit replies that this would be impossible because the Israeli state won't allow real estate sales to non-Jews. Since Irit's family acquired possession of the house through theft, Thuraya persists, she will only allow her to remain there if she acknowledges that fact. Tempers flare and she asks Thuraya to leave.

She and Emad continue their journey, ending up in Dawayma, nowadays an Israeli national park, whose abandoned ruins one ill-informed Israeli teacher imagines to be evidence of the Jews' Biblical history in the area. The couple decide to stay in one of the village's ruined houses, going so far as to hang a sign that says "Home Sweet Home" from one of the walls.

Some viewers may find a problem with the veracity of "Salt of This Sea." It's true that the decision of three otherwise law-abiding people to rob a bank can seem a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, there is more than a little truth in this plot device in that it illustrates how using law to deny an individual's civil rights can induce criminality.

More problematic is the ease with which the trio make their getaway by crossing into Israel - which has already been depicted, quite convincingly, as an authoritarian state that verges on totalitarianism if you happen to be Palestinian.

In conversation, Jacir demurs that, like everything else in the story, this element is true in that it underlines the porous nature of Israeli surveillance - which shows more aptitude in preventing Palestinians from entering the Occupied Territories than leaving them.

Audience members may be temped to regard the development of the plot after the bank robbery in non-realistic terms.

There are some reasons to do so - and not just because, upon crossing into Israel, Emad leans out the car window and cries "This is a dream!" More significantly, the trio's road trip around Israel - that part of Palestine forbidden to most Palestinians - is the most richly sensual, even visceral, part of the film.

Arriving at the sea isn't simply a matter of leaping into the water. It also sees Emad place an empty plastic water bottle next to his ear and listening to the way the sea breeze whistles through it.

When Thuraya arrives at her family house, she runs her hands over its old stone walls, then brings her fingers to her mouth. When she asks Irit what happened to the original furniture - and Irit says she assumes her parents sold it - Thuraya retches. When the couple decide to stay in the ruined village, an orange peel, carefully reassembled after the orange has been eaten within, sits on the dashboard of Emad's car.

As a glance at her earlier work will confirm, Jacir is a politically committed filmmaker with an auteur's sensibility and the tension between these two inclinations is played out in "Salt of This Sea."

Marwan, for example, is a filmmaker. "I want to make a movie about something that counts," he tells Thuraya. "Why the sun rises in the east. Why the earth rotates around the sun. And we're still stuck here."

Auteur cinema takes its cue from the stuff of nuance, narratives that defy partisan, black-and-white representations of the world. "The Salt of This Sea" laments how the divisions imposed by political and military occupation, and the political pre-occupation that they inflict upon the occupied, make such nuance impossible.

The Ayam Beirut al-Cinemaiya film festival continues until October 26 at Empire Cinema Sofil, Achrafieh. Tickets go for LL3,000. For more information call + 961 3 370 972

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.