Wajib
+Closing Night Film
+Festival Awards Announced
+Palestine
Sunday, 9/30
7:30 p.m.
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BONBONE بونبونة
Rakan Mayasi
narrative short
15 mins / 2017
Palestine / Lebanon
Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles
Minnesota premiere
A Palestinian couple wants to conceive a child, but the husband is currently detained in an Israeli jail where visits are restricted. Rather than wait until his release, they resort to unusual methods. With heart and wit, Bonbone addresses a very real, and very dangerous, phenomenon through which prisoners and their families defy occupation and secure their legacy.
Festivals and Awards:
Jury Prize, Festival Ciné-Palestine, France, 2018
Best Short Film, Almería International Short Film Festival, Spain, 2017
Toronto International Film Festival, Canada, 2017
Rakan Mayasi is an independent Palestinian filmmaker born in Germany, raised in Jordan, and currently based in Lebanon. He studied cinema in Lebanon as well as in Serbia, Germany, Morocco, and Egypt. He has worked with Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami at the Asian Film Academy. Mayasi has written and directed four short films.
WAJIB / واجب
Annemarie Jacir
narrative
96 mins / 2017
Palestine / France / Colombia / UAE / Norway / Qatar / Germany
Arabic with English subtitles
Abu Shadi (Mohammad Bakri) is a divorced father and school teacher in his mid-60s who lives in Nazareth with his daughter. Now that she is about to be married, the aging patriarch is anticipating life on his own. In preparation for the wedding, his architect son, Shadi (Saleh Bakri), who lives in Rome, travels to Nazareth to help the family. As Shadi and his father spend a day together hand-delivering wedding invitations to each guest in keeping with local Palestinian custom, the tense details of their fragile relationship come to a head, while each faces the reality of their very different lives. Performed brilliantly by actual father and son Mohammad and Saleh Bakri, Wajib demonstrates Annemarie Jacir’s filmmaking mastery through its style and subtleties.
Select Festivals & Awards:
Best Fiction Feature Film and Best Actor, Dubai International Film Festival 2017
Best Film, International Film Festival of Kerala 2017
Arab Critics Awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor, Cannes Film Festival 2018
Annemarie Jacir has written, directed, and produced more than sixteen films. Her short film Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) was the first ever Arab short to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at Mizna’s 2004 festival, and was a finalist for the Academy Awards. Her feature Salt of this Sea (2008) garnered fourteen international awards and was Palestine’s 2008 entry for the Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film. Wajib is her third feature film.
