World
Intimate film shows life inside a Bedouin village
Israeli director Elite Zexer spent years visiting Bedouin settlements and learning Arabic to make her debut film
February 25, 2016 11:28
By, Igal Avidan
2 min read
Israeli director Elite Zexer spent years visiting Bedouin settlements and learning Arabic to make her debut film
February 25, 2016 11:28ByIgal Avidan, Igal Avidan
Jalila is hosting a Bedouin wedding in an Israeli desert village where men and women celebrate separately.
But Jalila can hardly hide her emotions because the groom is her husband, Suliman, who is taking a younger woman as his second wife.
On top of that, Jalila's oldest daughter, Layla, has fallen in love with a boy at her university.
Layla is confident she will be able to convince her father, who has given her many modern advantages - a mobile phone, driving lessons, an education - that she should marry him.
But Jalila knows that Layla's father would like to force her into an arranged marriage - and when Suliman reacts even more harshly than she imagined, she takes up her daughter's cause.
These are plot lines from Israeli director Elite Zexer's Sand Storm, shown at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this month.
Ms Zexer discovered the Bedouin world through her mother, Chava, a photographer who has been documenting Bedouin for years. In 2011, Chava held an exhibition displaying photos of Bedouin women who are victims of forced marriages.
Elite Zexer recalls the exact moment when she got the idea for her film debut.
"A few years ago, I joined my mother at yet another wedding party in an unrecognised Bedouin village that she was documenting. The 19-year-old Arab woman had a boyfriend at her university. When her family found out about it, they took away her mobile phone, locked her at home and ordered her to marry a man from the same village.
"Because she was so attached to her family, she agreed - after a long internal struggle - to marry the man they had chosen for her."
On the wedding night, Ms Zexer was sitting with the would-be bride in her new home, that her husband, whom she had never met, had built for her.
"She was waiting for her future husband in the bedroom together with me and my mother. We could hear the men escorting the groom inside shouting 'mabrouk' ['congratulations'].
"We heard the fireworks, too, and I saw her anxiety because she was still in love with her fellow student. Suddenly, she looked at me and said: 'My daughter would not have the same fate', meaning a forced wedding."
But can a Jewish-Israeli film-maker write and direct an authentic Bedouin film in Arabic - a foreign language? In order to check this, Ms Zexer produced, in 2010, the 10-minute-film Tasnim, a portrait of a Bedouin girl whose father married a second wife. "The Bedouin loved my film and didn't stop asking me when my long-feature film about them comes out," she said.
Ms Zexer knew that she couldn't expect a Bedouin woman to act in her film "because they would not let a Bedouin girl be filmed: it would have ruined the family's reputation".
So Ms Zexer cast Arab-Israeli actors, with whom she spent three months learning the Bedouin dialect. She herself had been learning Arabic for two years.
How hard is it to direct a film in Arabic? "I understand the dialogues. It was difficult at times, but mostly I felt the sound of the Arabic language, the facial gestures of the actors and their feelings - that was enough for me."
A perfectionist, Ms Zexer has worked on her script for four years. She used her connections to shoot on location in Bedouin villages, which she had not known before. She says she kept away from Bedouin families whose personal stories she included in the film.
Sand Storm was completed only days before the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize. At the Berlin Film Festival -its European premiere - it received good reviews and Ms Zexer reports she was approached by several Syrian and Iranian viewers who told her how much they loved the film.
