Atash

  From Our Boys director Tawfik Abu Wael comes this gritty, claustrophobic drama of a father determined to revive the family home they’ve lost title to. Both in its immediate domestic context and on the larger political scope the father’s stubbornness proves paralyzing and destructive.

The three women have not left their arid outpost for 10 years, since the older daughter Gamilla was somehow sexually compromised. The scandal remains alive, as son Shukri learns when he’s attacked in town and his donkey emblazoned with “Brother of a whore.” The town beyond this home is itself a poor representation of civilization. 

In the main plotline father Hussein invests the family’s savings to build an illegal water pipeline. Its sabotage also points to the Arab citizenry’s inconsistent support for their own, especially in the legal grey area of the region’s dispossession.

The family live as outlaws. They steal trees to convert into charcoal, which they sell in town. Shukri aspires to go to school, which father Hussein takes as a personal and family betrayal. The Old World staves off the new — futilely. 

Hussein’s stifling grip on his family weakens when wife Um shows their adult children his secret, comfortable lair. This exposure suggests that Hussein — for all his projected austerity and determination — has a selfish corrupt side. Its heightened by his later imprisonment of Gamilla. After her accusatory disappearance and his exposure, Hussein shaves, puts on a suit and disappears. 

This enigma immediately gives way to the family’s response. Rather than embracing their release from his suffocating rule, they only throw themselves more intensely into their smoky work. The father’s futile attempt to revive his hold on a lost home has snuffed his family’s ambition as well as their selves. Their closing frenzy recalls Blake’s “mind-forged manacles,” manacles forged to control the mind but also manacles forged in that victim mind.  

The non-professional cast achieve a remarkable veracity in their performance. The script operates by suggestion, rarely spelling out its meaning. From the opening shot of blowing dust, as the family rushes to subdue their charcoal-making fire, the film defines an elemental level of existence. Though the characters are fully dressed, here is a Beckett view of our bare-forked animal.   

The enigma hangs to the end. We don’t know why Hussein ups and leaves. Perhaps he has resolved to seek a new life in town. But leaving his family to their labour, especially after we’ve seen the selfishness of his private lair, suggests he remains even now more devoted to his personal drive than to his family’s welfare. His escape coheres with his decision to spend the money on the pipeline rather than bring his family to a new life in a rental in town. Fixing so rigidly upon recovering a lost past can only cost hope for the future.    

       This film's politic is a bracing, constructive alternative to more sentimental fare like The Dead of Jaffa (see my blog). Instead of lapsing into the unquestioning sympathy for the Palestinians' plight, this film acknowledges its historic cause -- their own fixation on rejecting any compromise, their denial of history and their preference for suffering, even martyrdom, over co-existence with their historic rival.