Miral

People who can only see one side of the Israel-Palestine conflict have obviously never spent more than five minutes thinking about it. It's a depressing, complicated and ever-worsening situation, multiplied by the distressingly high fertility of both the Jews and Arabs and the lack of space to stick them in. Schnabel dedicated this movie to the people on both sides who think peace is possible. What I want to know is, who are these people and do they actually live in the Middle East?

Miral's strongest point is that it doesn't profess to encapsulate the conflict or present all of the sides of the issue. In fact, here the Palestinians are mostly portrayed as secular, sophisticated and intelligent. Even the political extremists (terrorists?) are Muslim only in name; they are motivated by democratic ideals, not virgins in the afterlife. The Jews, on the other hand, are shown as land-hungry religious zealots, the ones whose lives are dictated by superstition and God's always-mysterious dictates. (The onus is on the intelligent viewer to understand that there are smart people and fanatics on each side.)

Miral is a young woman, played by Freida Pinto (the beautiful Indian actress from Slumdog Millionaire). After her mentally disturbed mother committs suicide, Miral's gentle father (Alexander Siddig) sends her to a school run by Hind al-Husseini (Hiam Abbass). Miral is one of the few non-orphans at the school, which Miss Hind founded in her grandfather's mansion for Palestinian victims of Israeli occupation--even before the state of Israel existed.

The thing that's amazing is that Hind al-Husseini was a real person and her school on her grandfather's estate still exists. She is the true heroine of the movie, the only one who is truly committed to non-violence. She knows that raising well-educated Arab children is the only hope for for the rights of the Palestinians. Miss Hind dresses like a Westerner and promotes Western ideals. She also seems to be a little bit in love with Eddie, and American soldier played by Willem Dafoe.

But this story belongs to Miral. After being sent to refugee camps to teach children, Miral, an Israeli citizen, is shocked to discover the reality faced by other Palestinians, who live in constant danger of their houses being bulldozed to make way for Israeli settlements. She makes friends with some "political activists," which threatens to derail her education, as well as her relationship with her beloved father. The story is engrossing, though not necessarily exciting. A pervasive air of anxiety hangs over the whole thing until the last five minutes--you know that bad things are just around every corner.

At first, I was kind of turned off that an Indian actress was chosen to play the Arab-Israeli woman at the heart of this movie. But then I realized that the multiculturalism of the cast embodies what the movie is trying to say: Israel is everybody's problem. As nice as it would be to not think about that tiny armpit of a country, a disproportionate amount of Middle Eastern and world politics hinge on the state of its democracy. So it's nice that Palestinian and British and American actors came together for this. Miral may feel like a foreign film, but it's not; Julian Schnabel himself is an American Jew and probably the only person qualified to tell this story in this way.