Hany Abu-Assad's explosive film Omar is currently playing at the Angelika. Winner of the Jury Prize 2013 at Cannes, it is the Palestinian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards. Omar, sponsored by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, and more importantly, is independently financed, with a "budget contributed 95 percent by private Palestinian investors," reported Deadline.com.
Described as a "white-knuckled thriller," Omar is a tale of distrust and betrayal, personal and political. in the Israeli-occupied West Bank as backdrop.
American film enthusiasts may remember Abu-Assad's 2006 Golden Globe-winning Paradise Now about two Palestinians preparing a suicide attack in Israel.
Less well, perhaps, anchored in our memory is 2002 Rana's Wedding, a tale of the onerous burdens of living under Israeli occupation, which sours the joy even of a marriage.
Born in Nazareth, Abu-Assad is an Israeli Palestinian. Before turning to film making, he worked as an airplane engineer before turning his talent to the camera. He is in the forefront of a nascent Palestinian film industry.
Although Omar is completely filmed in Israel, it is a love story, twisted out of romantic mold, as The Times of Israel said, "a West Bank love story about a Palestinian youth forced to become a collaborator of the Israelis."
Omar goes straight to the gut. In one manner, it is the grainy texture on the day-to-day level of the vast network of Israel's surveillance of the occupied West Bank, so vividly captured in Dror Moreh's 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers—a series of interviews with the six surviving heads of Shin Beth, Israel's FBI. From the opening credits, Omar, powerfully, yet with restrained emotions, played by Adam Bakri, reveals the virginal intimacy between him and his love interest Nadja (Leem Lubany), that the everyday brutality of Israeli occupation distorts and corrupts, for the plain and simple reason that for the occupiers the West Bank and the aspiration of Palestinians for dignity and a homeland of their own, is nothing more than a battlefield cleared for war.
There is no feeling of compromise in Abu-Assad's montage in showing the way the Israeli secret services entrap, torture and turn Palestinians informers who, to all purposes, is their "whore," or "less than humans" captives, expected to turn tricks until their last breath—a ghastly fate, only obviated by condemnation, in Omar's case to 90 years in prison for simply saying on tape, "I will not confess," four simple words that Israeli law allows to him up for life.
So, Omar makes a Faustian bargain with the Israeli agent Rami, played with blood- chilling delight by the Palestinian-American actor Waleed Zuaiter, who also produced the film.
Bakri is a fly caught in Zuaiter's web. Omar is harrowing in the development of the collapse of Omar's hope for a private life. This is caught by an almost clinical analytic camera —close ups, long views and a rhythms of editing that, at times, are hallucinatory and disorienting.
Abu-Assad's Omar is the bloody wreckage of 46 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. He manages to capture the villainy of Israel's intransigence in putting off a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question until the Greek Kalends.
Omar injects into the American consciousness a badly needed emotional explosiveness that is sorely missing on the effects of seemingly endless occupation of a captured people. Abu-Assad brings to the screen destructive forces that warp both Israeli and Palestinian, as it destroys the humanity of one and the other.
Abu-Assad doesn't allow compromises in the script in the way Lebanon's director Zaid Doueiri did in adapting Yamina Khadra's Attack, turning the narrative on its head.
On the contrary, Omar is as much soul-searching as it is soul withering. Abu Assad's film brings an intensity and immediacy of which few films dare dream.
It would be churlish to give away the traumatic dénouement, other than to highly recommend seeing Omar at the Angelika.
Perhaps the words of the late Mahoud Darwish are appropriate here: Here on the slopes before sunset and at the gun-mouth of time, Near orchards deprived of their shadows, We do what prisoners do, What the unemployed do: We nurture hope. And, You standing at the doorsteps of houses, Get out of our mornings, We need reassurance that we are human like you And, the tragedy of Omar is the realization that he doesn't have a home, let alone a homeland of his own.
Described as a "white-knuckled thriller," Omar is a tale of distrust and betrayal, personal and political. in the Israeli-occupied West Bank as backdrop.
American film enthusiasts may remember Abu-Assad's 2006 Golden Globe-winning Paradise Now about two Palestinians preparing a suicide attack in Israel.
Less well, perhaps, anchored in our memory is 2002 Rana's Wedding, a tale of the onerous burdens of living under Israeli occupation, which sours the joy even of a marriage.
Born in Nazareth, Abu-Assad is an Israeli Palestinian. Before turning to film making, he worked as an airplane engineer before turning his talent to the camera. He is in the forefront of a nascent Palestinian film industry.
Although Omar is completely filmed in Israel, it is a love story, twisted out of romantic mold, as The Times of Israel said, "a West Bank love story about a Palestinian youth forced to become a collaborator of the Israelis."
Omar goes straight to the gut. In one manner, it is the grainy texture on the day-to-day level of the vast network of Israel's surveillance of the occupied West Bank, so vividly captured in Dror Moreh's 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers—a series of interviews with the six surviving heads of Shin Beth, Israel's FBI. From the opening credits, Omar, powerfully, yet with restrained emotions, played by Adam Bakri, reveals the virginal intimacy between him and his love interest Nadja (Leem Lubany), that the everyday brutality of Israeli occupation distorts and corrupts, for the plain and simple reason that for the occupiers the West Bank and the aspiration of Palestinians for dignity and a homeland of their own, is nothing more than a battlefield cleared for war.
There is no feeling of compromise in Abu-Assad's montage in showing the way the Israeli secret services entrap, torture and turn Palestinians informers who, to all purposes, is their "whore," or "less than humans" captives, expected to turn tricks until their last breath—a ghastly fate, only obviated by condemnation, in Omar's case to 90 years in prison for simply saying on tape, "I will not confess," four simple words that Israeli law allows to him up for life.
So, Omar makes a Faustian bargain with the Israeli agent Rami, played with blood- chilling delight by the Palestinian-American actor Waleed Zuaiter, who also produced the film.
Bakri is a fly caught in Zuaiter's web. Omar is harrowing in the development of the collapse of Omar's hope for a private life. This is caught by an almost clinical analytic camera —close ups, long views and a rhythms of editing that, at times, are hallucinatory and disorienting.
Abu-Assad's Omar is the bloody wreckage of 46 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. He manages to capture the villainy of Israel's intransigence in putting off a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question until the Greek Kalends.
Omar injects into the American consciousness a badly needed emotional explosiveness that is sorely missing on the effects of seemingly endless occupation of a captured people. Abu-Assad brings to the screen destructive forces that warp both Israeli and Palestinian, as it destroys the humanity of one and the other.
Abu-Assad doesn't allow compromises in the script in the way Lebanon's director Zaid Doueiri did in adapting Yamina Khadra's Attack, turning the narrative on its head.
On the contrary, Omar is as much soul-searching as it is soul withering. Abu Assad's film brings an intensity and immediacy of which few films dare dream.
It would be churlish to give away the traumatic dénouement, other than to highly recommend seeing Omar at the Angelika.
Perhaps the words of the late Mahoud Darwish are appropriate here: Here on the slopes before sunset and at the gun-mouth of time, Near orchards deprived of their shadows, We do what prisoners do, What the unemployed do: We nurture hope. And, You standing at the doorsteps of houses, Get out of our mornings, We need reassurance that we are human like you And, the tragedy of Omar is the realization that he doesn't have a home, let alone a homeland of his own.