In Her Footsetps

In this Arab Israeli documentary, a daughter films her mother’s last days before her death from cancer. The difficult times are complicated by the family’s various ethnic ties. Indeed the film’s subject is the tectonic shifts of tribalism within the one family.

The Bedouin father married the Arab mother. They fled his community in the night to preclude obstruction. She upset her family by marrying her choice, for love. Despite their long love, she still bristles against his Arab assumption of male authority.

The mother insisted on moving to an Israeli city, where their children could receive a Western, Israeli education. The filmmaker daughter thus grows up into Western values and responsibilities, but detached from her mother’s Arabic culture and even more remote from the Bedouin. She speaks Hebrew and English but no Arabic.

Those tensions come to a head over the mother’s burial. The Israeli town council won’t allow a non-Jewish burial in the city’s cemetery. The father finally submits to her insistence on burial among her people, instead of his. That incurs his shame of “dumping her” in her home town cemetery. 

  Their children are barred from their mother’s funeral. So instead of the funeral footage we get a replay of the parents’ marriage. Having seen the mother shrink at the end, we find her early beauty all the more heart-rending.

 The filmmaker followed her father's filmmaking interest, but the title defines her mother's shaping force.
In the last shot the father is a small isolated figure treading the vast empty dunes of his peoples’ life. Fulfilling their mother’s dreams, his children have departed to the outside world, a daughter back to New York, a son to alien Asia. If the daughters in their intellectual independence have followed in their mother’s footsteps, the bereft father returns alone to his own peoples’ wasteland. There the winds quickly erase his shallow steps. 

Between the “honour killing” of the father’s cousin and his daughters’ Westernizing and independence seem to stretch a few centuries. But the tribal exclusions and traditions survive into the contemporary. 

The mother is extraordinarily modern, to the point of welcoming her children’s true loves even if they were Jewish. Yet the town she’s lived in for 20 years won’t accept her burial.   
     As the film exposes this particular prejudice in the Israeli system, it should also be noted that this work was funded by the Israeli government. In the Middle East only Israel funds its critics. This is the artistic equivalent to the parliament, the Knesset, including  members dedicated to the destruction of the state they serve.