Review: Farha (2021)

96/100

"Palestine, 1948," the film tells us. In the impulse of a dying person, what must be done? Some would want to do the things they most enjoy. If it was on me, I would go and watch my favorite film, hike a mountain, perhaps crave some of my comfort food. But there will always be that tiny voice in my head, as I'm enjoying all this, telling me this will be my last time smiling. Others would solemnly reflect on their lives, lying on the deathbed. It is almost as if time is frozen, and the only task now is to await a ressurection by God.

For most of the Palestinians then, years are just a number. 1948 did not feel like 2012. Nothing, apart from the presence of the British (which, per the film, I must assume were the roots of Palestinian stone-throwing), seem to indicate anything. The village depicted in Farha, a feature debut by Palestinian-Jordanian Darin J. Sallam, is like most of the other villages in Palestine back in the day: a compound of average people, living an average life, per aspera ad astra. The eponymous main character, a teenager (Karam Taher), wishes to pursue education in the city. "Something is looming over the city," Werner Herzog narrated in his film Lessons of Darkness (1992), "the city that will soon be led waste by war. Now it is still alive, biding its time. Nobody has begun to suspect the impending doom."

That is the reason why, at any beauty Farha depicts, horror never seems to leave my mind. I know for a fact that this film will show this village in ruins. This is a film about the Nakba: an Arabic transliteration for "catastrophe", it refers to the violent displacement of Palestinians in the process of creating Israel. But make no mistake: the natural predictability of the film does not shoo awe away. Sallam refuses to omit any obvious foreshadowing, which blend well with the slice-of-life of Palestinians. The nuances give the simplicity a larger meaning, something frequently dismissed by the Israeli narrative: that Palestinians are humans. Only when that is established can the injustices of Israel's founding can be realized.

It is nearly impossible not to come out of Farha with a state of shock. It is also present within the Israeli government, who condemned the filmmakers for "falsely" portraying the Zionist militias as barbaric and violent, Netflix for giving the film a platform, and an Israeli-Palestinian-owned theater for screening the "propaganda." While it is true that Farha is a blend of a generational story from Sallam's mother, historical accounts, and many more into one narrative, it would be misleading to label it simplistically as fake: dismissal of Farha is just the first step to dismissing the Palestinian story as a whole. The Levant has been alleged as "a land without a people for a people without a land", with the neighboring Arab countries inciting the war with antisemitic beliefs. "Nazis," as Itamar Ben-Gvir puts it.

Farha is definitely unusual within the atmosphere of films about Palestine, because unlike the endless stocks of documentaries covering the blockade of the Gaza Strip and apartheid in the West Bank, its covers a historic event with significance among Israelis and Palestinians. The film did not uncover anything new, but it definitely gave more attention to the Nakba. It was something Israelis largely never knew of; thus, the shock over the film translates quickly into revisionist outrage. An opinion piece on the Israeli news website Ynet, while calling the film boring and sinful, also condemned the outrage as a blockade in peace at a societal level, though in turn criticizes Farha for being a provocateur in the first place.

I am a Chinese Indonesian. I was taught at school that Indonesia in 1965 committed an anti-communist purge, hence securing the country for a democratic future. It was not long later when I learned that the communists never committed the murder. And the purge? It targeted people like laborers, intellectuals, women, and Chinese Indonesians. When a documentary about this, The Act of Killing (2012), was released, it was met with backlashes and theater raids from those thugs, with the government calling it a "distortion of history" with communist sympathies. And the propaganda continues within the education system.

Far too often, materials like Farha are subjected to dismissive outrage, because as an Israeli  growing up to Israeli education and subjected to Israeli conscription, one would deny any allegations that the "enemy" as developed in their subconcscious are actually the victims. That then creates a stigma to the story of the "enemy", viewed as a national threat (there are overblown accusations that Palestine sympathizers are calling death to Israel) and a harmful belief that may harm the future if not stopped. Less than an hour into the film and Zionist militias attack Farha's village; in the blink of an eye, Farha is trapped in a room waiting for her father to return from fighting. Farha's entrapment does not only represent the tragic conditions Palestinians were faced with, but the ongoing blockade of their voices that, as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said, "promises to cotinue in the future."

In such situations, peopple are blinded to those who are in need. Many are not, but try to look away. As Farha progresses, we begin to lose vision of the outside, and sound becomes more sensitive. Yet only Farha can hear this. Anytime a Farha goes out, she is labeled as conspiratiorial. As for what I classify as the best aspects of the film, after the screenwriting comes the sound design, then the cinematography, and as a visual simp you'd not see me praising sound so often. The sound design creates a haunting aura that, as experienced during the Nakba, progressively deteriorates one's sanity. One must truly suspend their belief when watching Farha, for it is not enjoyable by a simple style of watching, but by really grasping its depth. It is often a mundane film to analyze but uneasy one to feel.

That does not detract the cinematography from any value at all. Rachelle Aoun succeeded in capturing the story visually in ways that I can never get out of my mind, and despite the various scenes mostly featuring darkness, there is a significant sense of space that allows us to explore the room Farha is locked in. When anything with brightness emerges into view, Aoun and the colorist (whose name I can't find) give it a significant presence that creates a yin-yang between what is inside and outside. Yet within that sigh of relief that light is still in view, it gradually transforms to frustration: light, as is hope, is inaccessible to her. What kind of perpetual shock could a baby feel if the first thing she sees upon birth is a nakba? "Every story," Laurie Anderson said in Heart of a Dog (2015), "is a ghost story..."

I feel like context is both important and unimportant here. Farha is not immune to valid criticism, and one that I would posit in the midst of this rave review is the lack of historical underlinings. The only times we ever understand what is going on is a scene where Palestinian leaders discuss the progressive displacement of other villages, and at the end of the film where the aftermath of the girl behind Farha is told. However at the same time I brush off those questions with two rhetorical questions. First, don't the filmmakers assume that every viewer knows what's up before watching the film? And second, why does violence require context? As Oppenheimer once posited: why is it just 'never again' for a specific community, but it becomes "complex" with regards to Palestinians?

Had Farha not be placed against the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would still hold at least 90% of the emotional intensity, and that is a good thing. It is not a "riding the wave" film that exploits the conflict to create such an emotional reaction worldwide. Had it be a simple story of, say, an Amazonian teenager whose village was ravaged by scientists from Harvard, I still would be moved to tears. The Palestinian struggle is a human struggle. The film does not explicitly label the soldiers as "Zionist militias" or the like, because violence of this kind doesn't need any qualifiers to make it worthy of condemnation. One must wonder: do politicians need to meet a Farha to know, the solution has always been there?

***

Talking about Farha is something I can do endlessly, but unfortunately I may divert into historical territory, which is not what this publication is about. However, I feel like my words thus far have been sufficient. This is my first review after a considerably long period of hiatus, so hello again! I will be posting more reviews when I have the energy to do so.