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“Laughing is a way to resist”: Annemarie Jacir on her father-son wedding drama Wajib | Sight & Sound
Annemarie Jacir is a trailblazing filmmaker: her 2003 short film Like Twenty Impossibleswas the first Arab short to be officially selected for Cannes; her 2008 feature Salt of This Sea was the first from a Palestinian woman. Both it and 2012’s award-winning When I Saw You were her country’s official Oscar Foreign Language Film submissions, forging more new artistic territory.
Yet her work shows that she has a profound connection with, and clear view of, the importance of history and its political and social obligations. In fact her new film Wajib roughly translates as ‘social duty’, focused on the age-old tradition of father and son delivering family wedding invitations by hand to their local community in Nazareth, Palestine’s largest city and the only one inside Israel’s borders.
Inspired by witnessing her own husband’s wajib, it’s a very funny and impassioned ‘odd couple’ road movie of sorts, as affable, traditional father Abu Shadi and his fiery ex-pat son Shadi – played by real life father and son Mohammad and Saleh Bakri – fulfill their obligations, while buried family tensions and revelations belatedly come to light.
Annemarie Jacir is a trailblazing filmmaker: her 2003 short film Like Twenty Impossibleswas the first Arab short to be officially selected for Cannes; her 2008 feature Salt of This Sea was the first from a Palestinian woman. Both it and 2012’s award-winning When I Saw You were her country’s official Oscar Foreign Language Film submissions, forging more new artistic territory.
Yet her work shows that she has a profound connection with, and clear view of, the importance of history and its political and social obligations. In fact her new film Wajib roughly translates as ‘social duty’, focused on the age-old tradition of father and son delivering family wedding invitations by hand to their local community in Nazareth, Palestine’s largest city and the only one inside Israel’s borders.
Inspired by witnessing her own husband’s wajib, it’s a very funny and impassioned ‘odd couple’ road movie of sorts, as affable, traditional father Abu Shadi and his fiery ex-pat son Shadi – played by real life father and son Mohammad and Saleh Bakri – fulfill their obligations, while buried family tensions and revelations belatedly come to light.