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"We risked our lives to shoot the film and if I'm honest, I wouldn't do it again" Hany Abu-Assad
Beyond how one (politically) perceives the age-old, devastating, fratricidal, and unfortunately very current Arab-Israeli issue, the fourth feature film by the director Hany Abu-Assad, born in Nazareth forty-eight years ago but European by adoption - he moved to the Netherlands when he came of age - is one of those typical cinematic films that should (mandatorily) be viewed by the widest audience: now more than ever.
Not just because of the director’s tangible ability to dissect in a dry and sober manner the delirious backdrops and the unacceptable aberrations of this daily yet epochal human tragedy, or even for the intensity and authenticity of the main actors (the excellent Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman) called upon to step into the shoes and deliver the tough, complex, and convincing interpretation of the controversial events of two young men condemned to death "by vocation."
Presented in theaters at the end of 2005, winner of the Blue Angel Award for Best European Film at the Berlin Festival, the work seeks to describe with a quasi-documentary style the incredible yet totally plausible mental journey through which two young Palestinian boys from today's Nablus "decide" to sacrifice themselves for the "just cause": the last hours before the (not necessarily) inevitable end are unraveled and experienced with an almost clinical eye, with a dry, direct, strangely light style yet damn dramatic and devoid of any easy rhetoric; Abu-Assad bluntly slaps our faces with the shocking, insane reality of a people, made up of ordinary individuals like the two protagonists, oppressed by endless, layered, and repeated defeats and disappointments at a human and social level; peoples subjected to the insidious malice perpetrated not just, as one might easily assume, by the "other side" but by their own brothers (essentially fanatical tormentors) who exploit in a scientifically aberrant and hateful way the para-religious belief and the never extinguished rancor nurtured and generated by so many, too many, frustrations of every order and degree suffered during the troubled existence in those lands.
If we were to measure the value of the work by the rate of bitterness and unacceptable resignation it provides to the viewer, we might necessarily have to speak of a masterpiece: a necessary film, albeit, in practice, useless: just daily scrutinize any network to see the effects of the currently unfolding dismal massacre.
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