Wajib (2017)
Wajib (2017) by Annermarie Jacir is a minimalist story of a father-son relationship that gives an intimate look into the two different views of life of Palestinians in Israel. With a strong political undercurrent, ‘wajib’ translates as duty and what this duty means to each character. On one hand, Abu Shadi (the father), who keeps his head down as he realizes the games he has to play as a Palestinian to survive in Nazareth, represents the older Palestinian generation living in Israel. On the other, Shadi (the son), who has emigrated to Italy, embodies a younger Arab generation that has the passion of revolution and rebellion still intact. The real life father and son duo, Mohammed Bakri and Saleh Bakri, produce two sides of an identity with their enigmatic characters and the dilemmas each character faces. How each character fulfils their duty as a Palestinian and the translation of that duty for each of them is what enriches the story of a father and son trying to navigate their differences, relationship and ideologies. Through her filmmaking, Jacir reclaims the Palestinian identity and remaps Nazareth from a Palestinian perspective by structuring absences of Israeli identity in the film. Similarly, she takes transnational forms of filmmaking and embeds them deeply in the local Palestinian context and culture, contributing to a distinct and unifying Palestinian identity under Israeli occupation.
A co-production between Palestine (Osama Bawardi, Philistine Films), France (JBA Production), Germany (Klinkerfilm), Colombia, Norway (Ape & Bjørn AS), Denmark (Snowglobe), Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and sold internationally by Pyramide International (Cineuropa.org), Wajib hints at the scale and scope of present Palestinian cinema itself. Jacir credits Bawardi as the main producer and the rest as co-producers in the films, maintaining the stance that this is indeed a Palestinian film first. However, she had to get funding from at least three European production companies to make the film, a common factor in all her past films (IMDb, Salt of this Sea). For a national film to do well domestically, it has to be international in scope (Higson). Higson’s words come true for Palestinian cinema not only in terms of fame and box office success but the creation of Palestinian identity. To create films that in turn help build and exhibit the suppressed Palestinian identity, Palestinian filmmakers have to depend on either Israel or Europe for production, distribution and exhibition. This is also evident by the distribution for Wajib being controlled by Pyramide International, a French marketing and distribution film. However, by casting two of the biggest Palestinian stars, Mohammad Bakri and Saleh Bakri, Jacir had already garnered local fame and success. Due to a lack of a central agency that would record box office figures for individual films in the Middle East, Wajib’s success remains unknown in box office numbers in the region. However, it can be recognized by its success in film festival circles. The film gained over 18 awards from film festivals all across the world from Special Jury Prize in BFI London Film Festival 2017 to Best Film in Kerala Intl Film Festival India 2017 (Wajib, pyramidefilms). The film premiered at Locarno film festival and was screened in more than twenty film festivals all across the world in 2017 and over fifty festivals in 2018. Unsurprisingly, the film’s major monetary success came from Italy — where Saleh Bakri had already gained considerable stardom before Wajib — followed by France and Spain, where it was publicized the most (“Wajib” Box Office Mojo).
Wajib truly exhibits an international aspect in its local context. Shadi’s persona itself is a stereotypical perception of a returning immigrant. However, his high minded attitude toward the crowded roads and the trash on the street is not the only indication of his removal from the Palestinian condition. His failure to realize the importance of the invitation delivering custom for his sister’s wedding that his father holds dear is a sad reality that is a crucial point of tension in the father and son relationship. Despite his dislike toward hand delivering the invitations, Shadi knows it is his duty as the son of the family to do so. The idea of duty runs deep in the narrative. The father - son duo disagree and challenge each other on everything from Abu Shadi’s smoking habit to which musician to hire for Amal’s wedding. Nevertheless, they both understand, as Abu Shadi says in the film, that “duty is duty” and this duty needs to be fulfilled. Their duty as Palestinians to survive and keep their story and traditions alive. However, they both carry this out in different ways.
While Abu Shadi is a realist, keeping his head down and making compromises so his children can live a good life is in direct contrast with Italy-emigrated Shadi, who is an idealist, in love with the romanticised idea of a Palestinian revolution. This is also visible in their perception of Shadi’s mother who had left Abu Shadi to start a new life in America. While Abu Shadi feels betrayed and thinks of her as a coward to leave her country and family behind, Shadi admires her courage to make a difficult choice for her own happiness. Throughout the film, these ideological differences are implicit in the duo’s actions and conversations until it pours over during their argument when Abu Shadi screams “What is this Palestine you talk about? Where is it? I live in it!” (Crewe, 2018). The audience starts to realize that each of them holds a different idea of Palestine and what being Palestinians mean in their imaginations, and the setting of the story implicitly plays a key role in conveying that tension.
Jacir chose to shoot the film in Nazareth, the birth place of Palestinian film legends like Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu-Assad, both of whom advised her against shooting in the city (Goodfellow, 2017). However, her decision to go ahead regardless, does take part in forming the basis of the story. As Jacir says herself, “Nazareth is like the third character of the film… the city is like the mother in the film, we don’t see her but she is definitely there” (Filmexplorer Switzerland). Jacir wanted to highlight the demeaning status of the more than 77,000 Palestinians living in Nazareth who are administratively classed as “Arab citizens of Israel” that makes the city a cultural battle ground. This systematic stripping of Palestinian identity in Nazareth makes Abu Shadi even more desparate to hold on to the local Palestinian custom of distributing the invitations by hand — something that Shadi doesn’t understand due to his removal from the local context.
Jacir’s use of the Hollywood road movie style also comes through in the film, a marker of her film education in America. However, she adds her own twist to the now-transnational genre and roots it in the local Palestinian tradition of delivering invitations. Another genre that Wajib can be attributed to is dramedy. “Nazareth is a violent city. It is a tense city and yet there’s humor. People are surviving. It is a city of survivors” (Filmexplorer). As Jacir says, the humor in the film is a direct ode to the city of Nazareth and its Palestinian survivors. She claims the film itself to not only be a portrait of the father and son but of Nazareth. Jacir mixes these transnational genres to display a complex Palestinian narrative, giving the genres a local twist and bringing focus to the complexities of living in Nazareth.
Jacir weaves the film with personal experiences. After residing in Jordan for several years in semi-exile, she moved to Haifa in Israel, one of the few Israeli cities where Palestinians and Israelis live in relative peace (Goodfellow). However, she does mention the lack of interaction between the two group which is prominent in Wajib as well. The personal roots of the film are not only Jacir’s but also her actors. A driving force of the film is the emotional close-to-vest performances by Mohammed and Saleh Bakri. Like Shadi, Saleh Bakri has been a prominent acting figure in Italian films, even playing the title role in the 2013 Cannes prizewinner Salvo by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (Pinkerton, 2018). As for Mohammad Bakri, he has been a prominent critic of the Israeli government for years, however, his character was one of a submissive headmaster who observes and obeys to guarantee a safe life for his children. Thus, the story gains intimate connections between the characters of the film and the makers of the film as well as a prominence of Palestinian experiences which is exaggerated by maintaining a stark absence of anything visually Israeli.
Palestinian use of filmmaking for story telling has been a fairly recent development. Palestinians have been recognized as nomads, peasants and insignificant populations stripped off of their collective identity first by the Europeans and then the Zionists (Gertz, 2008). The loss of their home land resulted in the loss of a national story. Jacir and other Palestinian filmmakers are thus making attempts at reclaiming Palestinian history (Oumlil, 2016). The choice to structure the film as a road movie thus, is a strategic choice by Jacir. Abu Shadi and Shadi’s journey all across Nazareth with little to no sights of Israeli symbols, is a strong medium to achieve the purpose of reclaiming Palestinian narrative and keeping it alive. Throughout Wajib as Jacir intentionally noticeably erases the Israeli presence in Nazareth to rebuild and reclaim the Palestinian presence and identity in the “Arab capital of Israel”. This complete erasure of Israeli identity is thus, almost equivalent to purely Palestine presence.
Jacir uses the journey to remap Nazareth as Palestinian territory. The father and son duo drive all around the city fulfilling a traditional Palestinian custom to deliver invitations to Palestinian families, talking about their duty as Palestinians. Though Abu Shadi wants to deliver the letter to a suspected Israeli spy to get the headmaster position, it never does take place due to Shadi’s strong opposition. This strong opposition toward interacting or acknowledging Israeli identity by Shadi and the film itself become a central piece of the film. During their final argument, Shadi says “We need permission to breath, permission to live, damn this life. You speak their language better than them and you remain invisible to them” to point out the oppression and the invisibility they experience living under a regime that wants to eradicate them. To this, Abu Shadi responds “you have no idea about the sacrifices I have made to give you a nice life. You have no idea what they are capable of”. Thus, Abu Shadi hints to another reason behind the removal of Israeli identity in the film. The behind-the-scene brutality toward Palestinians that Israel hides away from the public eye which remains unknown to most of the outside world, just like it is not known to the foreign returned Shadi. Thus, though Jacir is attempting to take back ownership of Nazareth and the Palestinian history, the silent danger and oppression that Palestinians in Israel fear everyday can not be ignored.
The car also becomes a central setting of the story and the journey becomes more important than the destination. The car becomes an integral part of the development of the characters and their relationship and acts as a safe haven for the two of them. Each stop throughout their journey adds more complexity to their relationship which bubbles out in the car. The audience sees the characters at their most vulnerable only either on the side of the road — during their final argument — or inside the car. It is only at the final scene when we see Abu Shadi and Shadi sitting on the balcony of the house, which also marks the resolution of the tension between them and the maturation of their characters as a result of the journey. The idea of mobility and identity go hand in hand in Jacir’s films. In Salt of This Sea (Jacir, 2008) as well, her protagonist comes back to Palestine to re-write her family’s history and take back her grandfather’s possessions that he had to leave behind while fleeing the country. In most of her films, a character returns or attempts to return to the homeland. This idea of mobility being directly attached to identity is not simply one of journey vs destination but that of return to the homeland.
Since “the right of return...calls into question the foundation of the state of Israel,” Jacir makes sure that this act is alluded to in her films as a means of uncovering the Palestinian story from under the Israeli narrative (Awad, 2002). Additionally, by bringing Abu Shadi and Shadi together at the end, she helps create the idea of a united front by the different generations. This united front is strengthened by Jacir’s representation of the Christian community of Nazareth that often remains in the shadows of the Occupied Territories. Thus, she makes an unknown part of the Palestinian community visible (Weissberg, 2017). Jacir is not only remapping Nazareth as a Palestinian territory but bringing different sections of the Palestinian community and different generations of Palestinians together, taking on a bold endevour of not only unifying an identity and stories that had been fragmented but making a statement. The statement that Jacir herself aptly put “the old are dying and the young are dying too, but nobody is forgetting” (Jacir, 53). Thus, keeping the Palestinian narrative alive in its people.
Wajib is just as complex and intricate as it is humorous and minimalistic. Jacir’s combination of genres in the film is a demonstration of taking transnational ideas and focusing them on to the local context. This leads to an understanding of the local that the international can relate to, amassing a wider audience, as can be seen from the festival success. Her use of setting and actors that are closer to the Palestinian narrative and that of the film, gives the film authenticity and the audience, an intimate understanding of its characters. Each character has a different version of Palestine in their imaginary; their distinct paths have taken them to different understandings of their one identity which has in turn led them to their specific wajib. Wajib is then not just duty anymore, it is survival. The survival of the Palestinian national narrative in simple traditions and simple stories. Throughout the film, there is a strict focus on the Palestinian experience of Nazareth with a complete erasure of Israeli markers but the threat of living under Israeli regime is still present in people’s conversations and the tension in the air. Jacir does not forget the effect of Israel on Palestinian population but her capturing of Palestinian traditions, people and experience is a defeaning declaration of survival and a promise to never forget.
Works Cited
Awad, Samir, Nadia Hijab, Roger Normand, and Gover, Yerach. “The Palestine Question.” Socialism and Democracy 16.2 (2002): 11–61. Web.
Crewe, David, and Annemarie Jacir. “Homeward Bound: The Perils of Duty and Palestinian Society in Annemarie Jacir’s Wajib.” Metro 198 (2018): 54–59. Web.
Gertz, Nurith, and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. Indiana University Press, 2008.
Goodfellow, Melanie. “Annemarie Jacir on the Tensions of Shooting ‘Wajib’ in Nazareth.” Screen International 15 Dec. 2017. Web.
Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 36-46.
Jacir, Annemarie Kattan. “Refugees and the Right of Return.” Socialism and Democracy 16.2 (2002): 48–53. Web.
Jacir, Annermarie, director. Wajib. 2017, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07QPQ11H2/ref=atv_dl_rdr.
Oumlil, Kenza. “Re-Writing History on Screen: Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of This Sea.” Arab Studies Quarterly 38.3 (2016): 586–600. Web.
Pinkerton, Nick, and Annemarie Jacir. “Wajib.” Sight & Sound 1 Oct. 2018: 78. Web.
Prot, Bénédicte. “Wajib: A Father and Sons' Reunion and Journey through Nazareth.” Cineuropa, 8 Sept. 2017, www.cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/332765/.
“Salt of This Sea.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 3 Sept. 2008, www.imdb.com/title/tt1090680/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_7.
Filmexplorer Switzerland, director. Interview | Annemarie Jacir | «Wajib». Youtube.com, 18 Oct. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-2DtZ4IOhU.
“Wajib.” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt6695212/?ref_=bo_gr_ti.
WAJIB, inter.pyramidefilms.com/pyramidefilms-international-catalogue/wajib.html.
Weissberg, Jay. “Wajib.” Variety 16 Oct. 2017: 11–11. Web.