Salata Baladi - Movie Review Example

"It is this urgency and necessity to tell a personal, closer-to-life story that drives and motivates this family fresco." (Daele, Koen Van; "A Home Movie in the True Sense"; Mumbai Documentary Film Festival; 2008; www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/ c746.shtml #top) Significant is the scene in which, while waiting in vain in Ramallah for the Israelis to reopen the Erez checkpoint which would enable them to visit their Palestinian brothers and sisters, Mary tries to communicate with her Palestinian friend in Gaza via webcam.

On the computer they succeed in establishing visual contact but the sound is missing. "Through this technical problem, the director instantly represents the harrowing situation of the Palestinian refugees caught in the Gaza Strip. Collectively punished for decades, this is a people whose voice has been systematically taken away, and remains all too often unheard." (Daele, Koen Van; "A Home Movie in the True Sense"; Mumbai Documentary Film Festival; 2008; www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c 746.shtml #top).

The film offers a perspective on how divided loyalties, as those of Mary between her pro-Palestinian convictions and love of relatives since migrated to Israel, make initially for indecisiveness, although blood eventually proves thicker than water. That perspective is unexceptionable as any other would have gone against human nature. Another is that rationalization comes naturally to those thus divided between loyalties."Distant View of a Minaret" by Alifa Rifaat is a collection of 15 short stories that, the blurb claims, "give readers a glimpse of what it means to be a woman in an orthodox Muslim society in Egypt".

(SPARKNOTES from Barnes & Noble). But while the setting may be Egyptian, the stories portraying different woes of women have universal appeal; for instance, a sexually dissatisfied woman, as in the title story, would be apt to remain stoic in the face of the death of her husband anywhere in the world, even in the US, not just in Egypt. In "Bahiyya's Eyes", Bahiyya, an elderly woman, tells her visiting daughter that she had recently visited a hospital where the doctor said she would soon go blind.

The imminent blindness, according to her, is the result of copious tears that she had shed all her life for being born a girl. She learned about sex by watching animals; she had fancied a boy in her village, but her family had got her married to another man who died shortly after the wedding. Bahiyya describes the loneliness of being a woman without a man, and that her life and youth had been a waste. The message of this story too is universal because being born a girl is regarded as a curse in several countries, including Egypt, although that perception may still be alien to some advanced countries like the US.

In "Degrees of Death", the narrator, who has begun to love the rabbits gifted her, realizes, on seeing nanny Zareefa kill one of them, that there are degrees of death for both human beings and animals as both get killed, either out of need or for sport; and that is a damning indictment of the human tendency to kill men and animals alike with a straight face in any country. "An Incident in the Ghobashi Household" shows to what lengths a woman can go to