Israel’s official entry for the best foreign language category at the Oscars is a drama in which the dialogue – for the first time – is exclusively in Arabic.
Sand Storm, a gritty film dealing with the lives of Bedouin women in an impoverished and conservative southern village, is the directorial debut of Elite Zexer, a Jewish-Israeli, and was automatically selected as the Oscar entry after winning the award for best film in Israel’s film and television awards, the Ophirs.
The prize was given during a tempestuous ceremony last week in which the film’s two leading women, both Israeli-Arabs, refused to join Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev, on stage.
The film, which will open in cinemas in the United States on Wednesday, was also the recipient of the world cinema grand jury prize at the Sundance film festival earlier this year.
The film tells the story of a woman preparing to welcome her family for a celebration of her husband’s marriage to a second, younger wife, and discovering that one of her daughters is involved in a secret relationship with a school friend.
Zexer has said she was inspired to explore the subject after accompanying her mother, a photographer, to document a Bedouin village.
Speaking to the IndieWire newsite earlier this year, Zexer said: “One day, she asked me to join her. I was immediately captivated. A day turned into weeks, then months, then years. These women became very close friends, and their stories became very close to my heart.
“On one of our visits, we escorted a young woman during her wedding to a strange man, a man she only married to please her family, while she secretly loved another. Minutes before she met him for the first time, she turned to me and said, ‘This will never happen to my daughter’.
“I looked at her and felt my stomach twitching. That’s the moment I knew that I had to make this movie.”
Conceding that her perspective was that of an outsider, Zexer said: “I spent years getting to know girls and women who went through the experiences portrayed in my film and rewrote the script again and again until I felt like it was accurate enough to give a voice to their ways of thinking and of seeing the world.”
Sand Storm is the culmination of years of work – including a shorter film on the same subject that Zexer made in part to see whether she and Bedouin friends felt it was authentic. Zexer spent two years learning Arabic so that she felt comfortable directing in another language.
One issue was Zexer’s difficulty in finding Bedouin actors, eventually recruiting Israeli-Arab actors who learned the Bedouin dialect for the film.
Sand Storm won a slew of awards at the Ophirs in a ceremony marked by controversy. Israel’s rightwing culture minister Miri Regev walked out briefly after a rapper included lines from the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish during his performance.
In an intensifying culture war in Israel, the awards were overshadowed by Regev’s behaviour and the reaction of the audience. The minister began by criticising the country’s film industry, suggesting it was an elitist closed club, which elicited boos and heckling from the audience. She then walked out after lines of Darwish’s poem Write it Down, I am an Arab were included in a rap performance to hand the award to Sand Storm.
Sand Storm actors Ruba Blal-Asfour and Lamis Ammar refused to take the stage to accept the award, with Blal-Asfour shouting that she would not stand alongside Regev.
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