A former painter and installation artist, the 46-year-old Gaza-born filmmaker Rashid Mashawari (
Curfew,
Ticket to Jerusalem, a veteran of 20 features and documentaries, has made one of the revelations of this year's Toronto festival,
Laila's Birthday, something of a road movie through his adopted city of Ramallah on the West Bank. The protagonist is Abu Laila (the brilliant Mohamed Bakri), father of a nine-year-old daughter on whose birthday the action takes place. He is a former judge, brought back by the Palestinian Authority to become part of the judicial system but locked out by the ubiquitous bureaucracy there, the ever-changing ministers. So he drives a cab to support his family. Yet, on account of his background in jurisprudence, he remains a functionary even with his passengers, commanding them what they can do and not do in his car.
"A character like this does not exist in our Palestinian reality," says the director. "His being a functionary, I'm talking symbolically. I don't care about traffic, about whether people can smoke in his cab: I'm referring to policy. Do we know where we are going? I don't believe our ministers are real. It's not possible to have them under occupation. And they change all the time because of the different opinions among Palestinians. Like our two governments, one in Gaza, led by Hamas, and one in the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Authority, which is Fatah.
Masharawi shoots the beauty of Ramallah, architecturally built of white stone and dotted with beautiful trees: This is not the Ramallah we know from news footage and horrifying docs. "I wanted the city to be a character and different from the way others have depicted it before. I didn't want the film to be like
Taxi Driver, in which the cabbie picks up passengers for THEIR stories. I wanted it to be HIS story."
The execution is perfect and unexpected. Explosions are heard, not seen, and we never see the humiliating checkpoints, to which Abu Laila refuses to drive. "We are in a mess," he says. "Through him we can face ourselves as Palestinians: where we are going with all this. We are not a state, but also not in revolution, not in negotiations. We are not happy. I don't like what Hamas is doing in Gaza, and I don't like what the Palestinian Authority is doing with negotiations.
"I'm trying to explain the situation under Israeli occupation," he continues. "It's 60 years old: It goes back to 1948 and the creation of two states. I want to explain what checkpoints, the security wall mean. I thought by structuring the movie with some humor, we can rethink things.
"I decided to be an optimist. I'm trying to say that we Palestinians can create a good future. The cake Abu Laila finds in the back of the taxi (he did not have time to buy a birthday cake, as his wife had asked) can be used for the family celebration. The flowers glued to the car (mistakenly, by a wedding party) can be used as a gift for his wife. This is a film first and foremost for a Palestinian audience. Let's look at ourselves and where we are going."
---Howard Feinstein
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posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/09/2008 01:20:00 PM
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