I was just a young teen in Hebrew school when the 6-Day-War erupted on June 5, 1967 in the Middle East. I was relatively unaware of the political issues, but I do recall that a classmate questioned our teacher about Israel’s perspective and wondered if there wasn’t some merit to the Palestinian position. In short order, the young man was directed to the principal’s office and his parents were called in to review the matter with our rabbi. Seriously.

At the time, my perception of the Middle East was largely informed by family, Passover seders and the1960 blockbuster EXODUS, starring Paul Newman. That film’s positive portrayal of Israel generated an unprecedented flow of donations and caused the Israeli government to create a film division to fund positive-message films. So goes the power of movies.

Needless to say, a lot has happened since 1960 including a more complex cinematic consideration of Israel and Palestine. In just the past two years, several terrific films about the Middle East have been released including WALTZ WITH BASHIR, AJAMI, and the subject of this blog, LAILA’S BIRTHDAY. Directed by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Mashawari, LAILA vividly defines the social and societal consequences of living in the non-stop chaos that is Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the central West Bank (and Mashawari’s hometown).

The movie chronicles a day in the life of Abu Leila (Mohammed Bakri), a former judge who, due to a lack of funding for justices, is forced to drive his brother-in-law’s taxi. The movie begins at dawn when Abu is awakened with the loud crash of shattering glass. He immediately checks in on his 7-year-old daughter, Laila. She’s fine, but the crash foreshadows a rough day ahead. As he leaves for work, Abu’s wife has just one request: be home by 8pm to celebrate their daughter’s birthday.

The clever conceit of the film is that we learn about Abu’s life in Ramallah from the passengers he picks up as well as those he declines. One passenger wants to go to an Israeli checkpoint, a request that a wary Abu refuses. Another hops out mid-journey when she spots a long line of people—she’s desperately hoping that the queue is for food and other supplies. And yet another sits in the passenger seat next to Abu and asks, as if he were an old friend, whether she should go to the hospital (she has high blood pressure) or the cemetery (her husband has recently passed); Abu takes her to the
hospital.

While noisy helicopters patrol above and gunshots crackle on every corner, Abu struggles to maintain some sense of order and control. But it is not long before we begin to see a fissure in his professorial reserve. When Abu stops for gas, he observes drivers casually chatting with one another while traffic has stalled in both directions. The drivers seem oblivious to the cacophony of honking cars around them. This is when Abu finally loses control, grabs a police megaphone and vents. It’s the Palestinian equivalent of Peter Finch’s breakdown in NETWORK.

There’s no question that social interactions in Ramallah have beenprofoundly affected by the absence of order and the constant threat ofviolence. And LAILA’S BIRTHDAY is remarkably successful at defining the extraordinary anxiety of an ordinary life in Palestine.

Bowing to growing international outrage over the imprisonment of film director Jafar Panahi, the Iranian government has now released him on bail. Iranian state television announced that bail was set at $200,000, according to an article published at the Telegraph.co.uk. No further information on Panahi’s release was immediately available.

On March 1, 2010, Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most celebrated and influential film directors, was arrested at his home for allegedly planning to make a film about the June 2009 election which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office. On Sunday, May 16, while still being held in Tehran’s Evin prison, Panahi began a hunger strike after government officials apparently threatened to arrest his family.

In a letter released by Panahi’s family on May 18, 2010, and published on the website IranHumanRights.org, Panahi stated:  “On Saturday night [May 15, 2010], agents attacked Evin’s Cell 56, forcing me and my cellmates to go outdoors without any clothing and kept us in the cold weather for one and a half hours… They even threatened to arrest my entire family and transfer them to Evin Prison and to send my daughter to an unsafe detention center in Rajaie Shahr.”

On May 3, 2010 Indiewire.com reported that Hollywood’s A-List directors had just signed a petition condemming Panahi’s detention and demanding his immediate release. Signatories included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, Ang Lee and Oliver Stone. Another petition, organized on Facebook, includes over 150 international filmmakers and is still accruing signatures online.

Panahi was supposed to serve as a juror at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and his absence did not go unnoticed. His juror’s chair was left vacant for the duration of the festival and Abbas Kiarostami, in Cannes to screen his new movie CERTIFIED COPY, called Panahi’s imprisonment “intolerable." According to the New York Times, Kiarostami also stated:  “When a filmmaker, an artist, is imprisoned, it is art as a whole that is attacked, and it is against this that we should react.”

Another leading figure who played a key role in championing Panahi’s cause was film actor Juliette Binoche, who won Best Actress at Cannes for CERTIFIED COPY. When she won her award, she held up a sign bearing Panahi’s name and said his only crime was “to be an artist, to be independent.”

More About Panahi

Panahi achieved early acclaim with the release of his first film in 1995 —-WHITE BALLOON -- which won a Camera d’Or at the Cannes Festival. When it opened in the U.S. shortly thereafter, it quickly became the most successful Iranian film ever released in North America. The film’s protagonist is a seven year-old girl who wants to buy a goldfish to celebrate Norooz, the Iranian New Year. We see the world through her eyes in real time as she attempts to navigate the “forbidden” Tehran marketplace on her own. Screenplay was by Abbas Kiarostami (THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES) for whom Panahi was an apprentice. Time Out London called the movie an “extraordinary debut feature…of audacious subtlety and simplicity.”
 
After its release, the Iranian government attempted to have the film withdrawn from the Oscar best foreign film category and prevented Panahi from leaving Iran to promote it. Panahi’s second feature, THE MIRROR, received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival. This film, also dealing with the human experience of social injustice as experienced by children, tells the story of a young girl whose mother fails to pick her up from school. She must make her way home through the chaos of Tehran on her own. Halfway through the movie, the young actress breaks character and asserts that she’s tired of acting and the movie moves back and forth between illusion and reality. In his review, Stephen Holden of the N.Y. Times said the film “…poses the deepest questions about illusion, reality and filmmaking. Its portrait of Tehran is unforgettable.”

Panahi’s most widely recognized achievement in film came in 2000 with the release of THE CIRCLE, a movie that criticized the treatment of Iranian women. Panahi won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and the movie was hailed as the Film of the Year at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. The film involves the intersecting stories of Iranian women who are struggling with a variety of issues:  giving birth to a girl when a boy was expected, navigating city streets where women are not supposed to walk by themselves, and facing death threats from family members over a possible abortion.  Despite its international awards, the film was banned in Iran.  In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert explains:  “…the film is profoundly dangerous to the status quo in Iran because it asks us to identify with the plight of women who have done nothing wrong except to be female.”

More recent films, such as CRIMSON GOLD in 2003 earned Panahi the Cannes Film Festival Jury Award. And in 2006, Panahi’s OFFSIDE won the Silver Bear (Jury Grand Prix) at the Berlin Film Festival. In the latter film, a group of Iranian women impersonate men so they can attend a World Cup soccer match.

Updates on Panahi's case will be posted here.