This week I’m sharing films from and about Palestine and depicting Palestinian perspectives. Free Palestine!
A sensitive Palestinian baker (Adam Bakri) is secretly wooing the sister (Leem Lubany) of one of the guys with whom he’s planning an attack on local Israeli military forces. And that’s only the beginning of the mess Omar finds himself amidst in 2014’s Omar, Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language film that year.
It’s all actually less overtly political than you might expect: this could be much the same terse, tense suspense drama if it were taking place in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, or in East Berlin in the 1960s, or in almost any place at almost any time when a small band of resistance fighters push against a far more powerful — and some would say despotic — ruling force.
Writer-director Hany Abu-Assad creates a compelling portrait of an impossible situation in which there can be no real winning, only varying degrees of losing. (Read my 2014 review.)
US: stream on Kanopy and Netflix; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent on Curzon Home Cinema; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Omar at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
