THE PRESENT
Palestine, 2020, 24 minutes, Colour.
Saleh Bakri, Maryam Kanj, Maryam Basha.
Directed by Farah Nabulsi.
A multi-award-winning short film from Palestine, winning at Clermont Ferran and a BAFTA for short film, Oscar-nominated.
The film is highly emotional – especially for the Palestinian audience but also for a sympathetic audience concerned about Israeli treatment of Palestinians. It is a film which can arouse an angry response about injustice and humiliation.
The story is simple, a father wanting to get home and having to go through the border control, his happiness with his wife and daughter, the wedding anniversary, his taking his daughter shopping and their buying a fridge to replace their broken down refrigerator, and has a gift for the anniversary.
There are two key scenes at border control. The film presents the young Israeli soldiers, men and women, as single-minded, hostile to Arabs, eager to humiliate them, stressing regulations, searches, delays, even cage internment. The scene with the father taking his daughter across the border and his being subject to harsh treatment, the little girl having to sit on the ground waiting for her father. Then there are the happy scenes of shopping, the supermarket, buying the tiara, the fridge, tying ribbon around it, the delivery van and its being stopped at the border, the father deciding to borrow the trolley and carry the fridge home because he lives just across the border.
Again trying to get across, the verbal attacks, the humiliations, the father losing his temper. And, the little girl, has wet herself and is upset. And she is still wearing the tiara that her father bought her at the supermarket. The problem is that the fridge is too large to get through the control area for people to get through. There are many arguments, the father pleading that he lives nearby.
Then, as they argue, the little girl pushes the fridge through the more open space and one soldier lets the father through.
(For audiences interested in dramatising such difficulties of border crossing between Israel and Palestine the powerful feature film, Crescendo, also has similar kinds of harsh sequences.)
