In a village on a hillside in the ruggedly beautiful yet disputed lands of the Golan Heights, a Druze family is preparing for a wedding, and preparing to lose a beloved daughter and sister forever. Mona’s wedding day is bittersweet, for she knows that before the sun sets she must cross the border in a white gown, into the arms of her Syrian husband and his family, never to return to her village again.

Acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis’ award-winning comedic drama, The Syrian Bride (in Arabic ‘urus suriyya; in Hebrew Ha-kala ha-surit) is a masterful stroke of storytelling. Set in the village of Majdal Shams, the film weaves together the entanglements of a modern family with the complexities of place and time. It is the summer of 2000. The Israeli military is only a year removed from its evacuation of southern Lebanon, peace talks with the Syrians – in which the fate of the Golan is the primary issue – have broken down, and now the Syrian president Hafez al-Asad has died.

In Majdal Shams, the villagers prepare to demonstrate in support of al-Asad’s successor, his son Bashar, on the very day that the family of embattled patriarch Hammad (Makram Khoury) will send one of its own out of Israel. Before the bridegroom, a Syrian television star, can meet his wife, Hammad must oversee the wedding festivities in his home, coordinate the border crossing with the Israeli authorities and the Red Cross, negotiate his solidarity with the village elders in their support of Syria without attracting the reprisal of a Javert-esque Israeli military officer, and incorporate his estranged son back into the folds of his family.

Riklis and co-writer Suha Arraf deftly focus the audience’s gaze on each aspect of the family dynamic, drawing in each story from its own perspective to the context of the family. While Hammad’s ostracized but stoic elder son Hattem (Eyad Sheety) returns home for the first time in seven years with his Russian wife and son, his younger, more cavalier son Marwan (Ashraf Barhoum) returns from Italy with a trove of gifts and a desire to rekindle an affair with Jeanne (Julie-Anne Roth), a Swiss Red Cross worker. The village elders have censured Hammad for his son who married a foreigner, and have threatened to boycott Mona’s wedding. Meanwhile Mona (played by Clara Khoury, who played another embattled bride in the 2002 Hany Abu-Assad film Rana’s Wedding), is waiting in limbo for her courage to surface as she prepares to marry a stranger she knows only from his soap opera persona.

The singularly dominant performance in the film, however, is delivered by Mona’s older sister Amal (Hiam Abbass). A truly heroic soul, her struggle to balance her fading strength between a controlling husband, a desperate sister, and a headstrong father demonstrates that fissures within the family are more urgent, and often weightier, than those of the political realm – even in a place such as Majdal Shams. Amal has dreams of her own, which include the reconciliation between her father and brother, and a bright future for her children, one of whom has been caught in a teenage tryst with a questionable character. She also has a secret to reveal to her husband Amin (Adnan Trabshi), a man with whom she now finds it difficult to reason with.

The story slowly swells along a path of family dysfunction and repair, climaxing at the comical exchange of bureaucratic nitpicking which awaits Mona when she and her family reach the Israeli-Syrian border. In case the audience has forgotten how complicated some weddings can be, Mona’s nuptials now become an international affair. Will she make it across? Will she want to?

The main thrust of the film’s story transcends any particular political agenda. Riklis opens the film with a textual prologue that briefly explains the environment of divided loyalties in Israeli Druze communities, though a wider context of the social situation of the minority Druze cannot be fully gleaned from the film. Aside from this tangential concern, the film excellently anticipates its audience’s interest in a straightforward event made complex by the politics of family and the exigencies of living in a disputed land.

With oftentimes melancholic music and enrapturing cinematography, the film is a brilliant human drama in a completely unaltered reality.

The Syrian Bride took home the Grand Prix at both the 2004 Montreal Film Festival and the 2004 Auxerre Film Festival, and has garnered at least seven total awards worldwide, including Best Actress for Hiam Abbass at the Festival du Film Mediterrané in Bastia, Corsica, 2004. It is scheduled for US release in 2005.

Film Title (English): The Syrian Bride
Length: 97 minutes
Language: Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, French with English subtitles
Official Website: http://www.syrianbride.com/english.html

Richard Alexander Johnson (AM '05) is a graduate of CMES's AM program in Middle Eastern Studies.