“Omar” a Return to Form for Star Palestinian Film Maker.

Hany Abu-Assad’s “Omar”.

Hany Abu-Assad’s third film Par­adise Now (’06) was one of the films of the last decade. Detail­ing the lives of a pair of sui­cide bombers from Nablus as they pre­pare for their mis­sion on Tel Aviv, it man­aged to be impas­sioned and yet some­how rel­a­tive­ly impartial.

Or at the very least, as impar­tial as it can ever be for a Pales­tin­ian film mak­er born in Israel to make a film about what life is like for those con­demned to live in the Levant.

He was lured to the States for The Couri­er in 2012, which went straight to video, but he is back on home ground for this his fifth film, Omar.

Adam Bakri and Leem Lubani in Omar.

Omar is one of a trio of young men, friends since child­hood, whose sole aim is their oppo­si­tion to Israel. But they do what they do un-think­ing­ly, auto­mat­i­cal­ly, in much the same way that monks attend to their dai­ly prayers. It’s just what they do. And in between, they live their lives as any­body else does.

Except of course, that what they do rad­i­cal­ly colours and irrev­o­ca­bly trans­forms every oth­er ele­ment of those lives that they are try­ing to live. Fam­i­ly, careers, plan­ning for the future and most of all love, are all giv­en a hope­less­ly dra­mat­ic edge because of the back­drop against which they must all be enacted.

Omar is a less polit­i­cal and a much more per­son­al dra­ma than Par­adise Now was. But it is every bit as pow­er­ful. And what it does demon­strate, is that Abu-Assad has learnt to par­cel out his dra­mat­ic twists and turns almost as impres­sive­ly as the mod­ern mas­ter of per­son­al dra­ma, Iran’s Asghar Farha­di (reviewed ear­li­er here). The ways in which Omar’s life, both his pri­vate and his pub­lic ones, unrav­el is painful to behold.

The Lev­ant is a won­der­ful cor­ner of the world to have to go dig­ging for dra­ma in. But it’s almost incon­ceiv­able that that dra­ma should be found on the sur­face of real people’s actu­al lives. And not in the fiendish­ly depraved depths of an unho­lily imag­ined Hell.

You can see the Omar trail­er here. And the Par­adise Now trail­er here.

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