Today, I saw Julian Schnabel’s new film Miral. It won’t be arriving in theaters in the US until next March, so it will be awhile until we see what effect it has, but my initial impression was amazement at what I was watching. Here was a film following many of the conventions of a traditional Hollywood film, but this time it was telling the Palestinian liberation story (which might explain why it was not produced in Hollywood and instead was a French/Israeli/Italian/Indian co-production).
The film, based on Rula Jebreal’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, takes us from the Nakba, and children orphaned during the Deir Yassin massacre, through the first Intifada to the signing of the Oslo Accords. I know there will be criticisms, and I have a few that I’ll share later, but right now I am struck by the emotional impact of the film. You follow the lead character through checkpoints, refugee camps, home demolitions, interrogations, humiliations and protests. After that it is impossible to not understand, and feel, the Palestinian call for justice.
Many times on this site we have reflected on the 1960 film Exodus that helped form a view of Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for a generation of moviegoers. It would unrealistic to expect Miral to carry a similar cultural weight, but it is resonable to draw a line connecting the two and ask whether this film might reflect a current moment where understandings of Israel/Palestine are shifting radically. It appears this thinking might not be too far from the filmmaker’s own experience. The press notes distributed at the screening quote Schnabel as saying the following:
Before I made this film, I hardly knew anything about Palestinians. But I’ve been following the story of Israel my whole life. As a child, I remember watching Exodus at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theatre with my parents. Everybody stood up when they sang Hatikvah and put their hands on their chests. My mother and father were very proud. I recently learned from my sister Andrea that my mother was President of Hadassah in Brooklyn . . . in 1948, the year of Israel’s birth. Making this film in Jerusalem allowed me to see this world for the first time, and to work with a landscape that I needed to see.
Many others need to see this landscape as well, and hopefully Miral will introduce them to it.
Update:
A Mondoweiss reader recommends that Netflix users add the movie to their film queue to show that this is an interested audience for the film. You can find it here.
