Movie Review: Canada Palestine Film Festival

“Banking on Security” by Peter Vesuwalla (Uptown Magazine, Sept. 23, 2004, page 27)

At its core, Rana's Wedding is a pretty straightforward love story about a young woman setting out to find the man she loves.

The tale is complicated, however, when Rana's father insists she choose from a list of more successful, eligible suitors.   She's given an ultimatum: Choose a groom from the list by 4 p.m. before her father leaves for Egypt and takes her with him.   Since hers is to be an Islamic wedding, during which the bride traditionally waits in another room while her father joins hands with the groom and takes the vows, it's pretty important her father shows up.

Rana makes a break for it and sets out to find Khalil, a dashing young theatre director.

Oh, there's one little snag: Rana lives in occupied Palestine, and the simple act of crossing town to reach the theatre requires her to negotiate roadblocks and weave her way through clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and Arabs armed with rocks.

There are 200 roadblocks and checkpoints dividing the West Bank of Gaza [sic] into over 300 fragments, according to Sobhi Zobaidi's short documentary A Caged Bird's Song , and those who cross the lines are apparently at the mercy of the soldiers.

When I asked the Canada Palestine Support Network for a few samples from the Canada Palestine Film Festival: Images of Occupation and Resistance from Israel-Palestine , they gave me three films – Rana's Wedding, A Caged Bird's Song and the short film Like Twenty Impossibles – all intended to provide a look at how the occupation, the checkpoints, the roadblocks, the need to present ID at a second's notice and the fear of deportation affects everyday people.

The impression left by these films is of Jerusalem as a once-beautiful, picturesque city now in partial ruins, with men in uniform around every corner.

The people we meet are students, actors, filmmakers and normal citizens who don't look much different from you or me in terms of their clothes, culture and manner.

The films, from what I've seen, are not anti-Israeli and certainly not anti-Jew, but they are anti-occupation.

There is, of course, the unfortunate timing of the festival – right at Yom Kippur, which is a day of fasting and repentance for Jewish people.   Festival spokesman Paul Burrows says it was an accident, and even the Jewish members of the Canada-Palestine Support Network didn't realize the conflict until after the festival was programmed.

On Sept. 21, B'nai Brith spokesperson Karen Lazar voiced suspicion in the Winnipeg Free Press that the scheduling was deliberate, and while this is understandable her request for Mayor Sam Katz and police chief Jack Ewatski to put additional security in place during the festival is a little over the top.   No one is likely to come out of Rana's Wedding and put a brick through a window, and Cinematheque patrons, on the whole, don't often riot.

But Lazar's concern that the films are one-sided is quite founded, particularly with respect to A Caged Bird's Song , in which students, blocked from easy access to university, repeat over and over that the checkpoints have nothing to do with maintaining security and everything to do with exercising control.

The truth of that is not debated in the film, but these films aren't so much about political policy as they are about how people feel.   Whatever the soldiers are doing there, this is how they're perceived by the people who see them.

Peter Vesuwalla talks movies with Terry MacLeod every Friday at 7:45 a.m. on CBC Radio One 990.