Salt of the Sea

I seriously think the long hours of work staring and focusing deeply into the minutiae of getting the job done has made me forget a lot. I don't think I can even speak intelligently any more about things I learned in high school, college, or that graduate degree I barely finished. Being in Amman has taken me back to the things I did before working full time and studying part time. Movies and martial arts.

Tonight I went to the Palestinian Film Festival in Jordan's pre-eminent arts center. It was the closing night and they showcased "Salt of the Sea." The auditorium was crammed with people sitting on the stairs of the main exits rows and a photographer occasionally blinding theater-goers with the flash of his camera. A few times, a theater patron would take pictures of the screen, I wondered if that even works given one would think the flash would white out the projection.

Anyhow it was a really good film that brought up a lot of questions. Soraya (played by Suheir Hammad-of def jam fame) born in the United States goes back to Palestine to reclaim her "right" of return. Territory, righteousness, dreams, and humiliation are specters in this film. Believing to do what is right she ultimately defeats her own goals. Probably one of the things, maybe because I'm old and narrow minded, struck out in my mind was how she meets a man she cares for who wants nothing more than to leave the occupied territories. He wants to go to Canada but his exit visa keeps getting rejected. She holds a U.S. passport and wishes most of all to get a Palestinian passport. Can they co-exist? She can enable his dreams or make them worse for the sake of her own, which are grounded in the two generations of her past. Does reclaiming land, really heal someone? And what is exactly a home? Is it a house one's grandparents built, or is it the people one finds along the way that make the passing of time a joy? Salt is a foreign film submission for this year's Academy Awards.

welcome the United States of America

So I can't help but do a pseudo political post. When I saw, read, digested that Barak Obama was the President-elect, I was really relieved. Not because I'm a Democrat, but it finally proved that the leader of the free world had progressed to stand among its peers to choose intellect, courage, and youth. That finally American progress was evident in the highest post of leadership and that the frightening unspoken undercurrents of bigotry in American society were not the force they once were. That the jaded cynic in me and others were proved utterly and completely wrong, very gladly.