By Dennis Hartley
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on May 21, 2016)
It’s tempting to describe Rifqi Assaf’s road movie as “Little Miss Sunshine in the Arabian Desert” but that would be shortchanging this humanistic, warmly compassionate study of life in the modern Arab world. It’s essentially a three-character chamber piece, set in a VW van as it traverses desolate stretches of Jordan. Fate and circumstance unite a taciturn Palestinian who has been living in his van, with a chatty Palestinian divorcee returning to a Syrian refugee camp and an exiled Lebanese TV director. A beautifully directed and acted treatise on the commonalities that defy borders.
This film doesn’t appear to be available on DVD or any streaming service. Even IMDB doesn’t seem to know it exists. Suggestions?
Daryl, my best guess is that the film is yet to pick up a domestic distributor, as it only seems to have been hitting the festival circuit at this juncture. I’ve observed that some films I catch at SIFF take a year or more to get picked up (some never do!), but this really is an exceptional film, so I’d say it has a good chance. Here’s one possible platform to view it; I can’t vouch for its validity because I’ve never heard of it (i.e., not sure if it’s an unauthorized bit torrent server…although it SEEMS legit)-
https://pro.festivalscope.com/director/assaf-rifqi
Hello guys,
Thank you Dennis for the nice review, the film will have its commercial release in theaters around the world soon this year, if it doesn’t reach to your hometown, it will be available on DVD, Blueray and VOD soon after that.
IMDb page of the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4829236/?ref_=nm_knf_i1
Well, there you go. Thanks for the update!