Palestinian And Proud

- Iain Akerman

The director Annemarie Jacir is talking weddings. Not her own, as she’s already married, but the concept of them. Or at least, the masculine tradition of hand-delivering wedding invitations in Palestine.

“Although people have become more lax about it, for the Palestinians in the north it’s still taken very seriously,” she says. “There is no way to mail, or even have someone else deliver an invite. The men in the family are supposed to hand deliver every single wedding invitation and I found this very interesting – the need to hold onto this tradition, especially in historic Palestine, that is somehow a way to insist on their identity as Palestinians.”

It is late October and the two of us are discussing Jacir’s new film, Wajib, which is to have its Middle East premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival in December. Centred on the peculiarities of this Palestinian tradition, it is limited almost entirely to the confines of a car.

It is also Jacir’s most dialogue-heavy film to date and stars real life father and son, Mohammad and Saleh Bakri, as their troubled father-son relationship unfolds through the course of a single day.

“I wanted to tell a story about the relationship between father and son, about two men who have lost their family and are somehow trying to find each other again,” says Jacir, who is also a published poet. “Two men who have made different decisions in their life and just need a bit of respect from the other. At the end of the film, I don’t want to say who is right and who is wrong – I just want to be honest about their pain, and their reality. This film is about them finally saying to the other all the things they have needed to say for a long time.”