As I mentioned before, my first Berlinale day was actually a very, very full one. I saw 3 films and one opera and by the end of the day, I was of course positively tired. This was the first film of the Berlinale I saw with Loris, and it ended up being a good start into a satisfying Berlinale. This was also the only Panorama film I saw (Pixelmatsch saw “Que horas ela volta?” and 6451 saw “Tell spring not to come this year”) if you don’t count “Ode to my father” which ran in the Panorama Special. I was genuinely hoping that it would win the Panorama audience prize, but in the end “Que horas ela volta?” got it, which was also nice.
Al-Hob wa Al-Sariqa wa Mashakel Ukhra (Love, Theft and Other Entanglements)
Palestine 2015, Muayad Alayan, 93′
The story revolves around Mousa who steals a car, not realizing that it belongs to the Palestine militia and holds a kidnapped Israeli soldier they want to use to exchange for prisoners. Being threatened by both the Israeli and the Palestine militia, Mousa is now a whole new world of trouble adding to his old ones (being the lover of a married woman, not having a job, needing money to leave the country) and he spends much of the film escaping one tricky situation into another.
The cinema was packed, probably because the idea of watching a film from Palestine is intriguing (and to be honest, it was one of the reasons we saw it too). We were happy that the film seemed like fun, and it really was. It had fun and, from what I could tell, not overly Western humor, with lots of slapstick but also in the way the characters interacted with each other. We laughed a lot whole lot throughout the film.
I was mostly a fan of the relationship between the protagonist and the Israeli soldier. I loved those little moments in which they struck up a friendship, both being simple men and ultimately just a tiny screw in the big whole machine of war and politics. In comparison to that, I absolutely did not care about the women. I would have been perfectly happy if she only appeared in the very first scene of the story to show how Mousa has a generally unstable life (including an unstable, mostly meaningless affair), only to never show up again. Sadly she never really gained any depth as a character, and anything related to her was just ultimately less interesting. Loris likes to joke about how the film would have been perfect if it had skipped on the love and it was only “theft and other entanglements” and I wholeheartedly agree. Also, why did they have to put that strange make-up and hairdo on her, only to prettify her immensely in the last scene of the film?
They had a Q&A session at the end of the film, and boy that was painful. It was so late that I just wanted to leave, but out of curiosity we stayed a little. Ultimately the filmmakers did an amazing job fending the stupid questions. When they were asked about politics, they told little anecdotes about how they got “caught” with the actor wearing an Israeli uniform tied up at the back of the trunk and had to explain what it was all about. Then one of them had a “toy” gun as stage prop in his backpack and forgot about how it was there when they were being checked. They talked about the irony that while the whole area was heavily militarized, people were still immensely afraid of normal people carrying guns. It was actually a very well-done Q&A with a bunch of very likable, competent people for whom politics may be complicated emotionally, but it can also be taken with a grain of salt even in their dire situation. With a main character who screams “You took away our country” to his Israeli interrogator, the film actually makes a very good case for the political problems of Palestine. It’s not all that complicated really – they simply took away their country, and not only it is difficult to fight, it’s difficult to even survive as a person with some sort of dignity.