After an Israeli soldier is arrested, a Palestinian baker experiences a unique experience by working as a detective, but his true motives and alliances appear to be unknown to anyone. With the passage of time, this man finds himself already distracted as a dangerous match begins, does he play his Israeli treatment or do things turn out to be a bad path.
From button-pushing Palestinian writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, who gave us the inflammatory Paradise Now in 2005, comes an equally piercing, if less politically strident look at life under Israeli occupation.
Doesn't provide easy answers as it builds its pressure cooker environment, putting primary attention on the personalities involved, allowing for a human perspective as it details acts of breathless survival and suffocating paranoia.
Abu-Assad offers no solutions here. Instead he paints a portrait of the daily rhythms of the occupation, an endless conflict that has seeped into every aspect of life in the West Bank.
Abu-Assad does not aim for the Dardennes' breathless immediacy. Rather, the story is laid out in a lucid, diagrammatic way, like a mathematical proof that for someone in Omar's position there are no right choices.
Beautifully shot, complicated, smart, and undeniably intense ... well-deserving of its place as the Palestinian nominee for this year's Best Foreign Language Film.
This gripping Palestinian thriller evokes Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers in its depiction of not only the psychological pressures faced by people under occupation, but the murky moral consequences of retaliating.
