Passing Dreams

The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs with a mix of in-person and online availability from October 17 through October 26. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.

Palestinian cinema is a cinema of movement. Characters are always on the move. Sometimes the movement is forced, sometimes survivalist, sometimes only desired, occasionally liberatory. Gazan-born Rashid Masharawi’s new film Passing Dreams concentrates the metaphor of movement into a lost pigeon and a young boy’s attempt to recover his pet bird. He doesn’t soften the political reality in translating Palestinian subjugation onto non-human life, as allegories about human rights violations tend to go, but instead illuminates human life under the pain.

Technically, the bird is already gone and Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash) wants to find it, having heard from the local barber that pigeons return to their original owner. The young boy journeys with an empty bird cage on his own from his camp to Bethlehem to Jerusalem and eventually to Haifa to recover the lost pigeon. His uncle Kamal (Ashraf Barhom), an artisan storekeeper, lives in Bethlehem and gifted him the bird, but it turns out he got it from someone else who also got it from someone else…hence the road trip across Palestine. Kamal and his daughter Mariam (Emilia Massou), Sami’s older cousin and an aspiring journalist, unexpectedly chauffeur their kin from city to city in search of the bird. Reducing the politics of the Palestinian situation into an allegory of a boy tracing the steps of the bird through Palestine back to his own ancestral home powerfully simplifies the profound pains of exile and life under occupation.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.