“They betray you and you surprise him… They beat you while you are sitting in the house.”
A dialogue between the two sisters, Amal and Samah, in the movie “Daughters of Abdel Rahman” that summarizes the reality of women in our society. The film, written and directed by Zaid Abu Hamdan, and produced by Saba Mubarak and Aya Wahsh, tells the story of four sisters, who are different on all levels, who meet following years of separation in their father’s house, who suddenly disappeared, and they begin a journey in search of the missing father.
The older sister, Zainab, played by actress Farah Bseiso, is unmarried, and bears the responsibility of caring for the sick parent, and trying to reunite the family. The second sister, Amal, played by Saba Mubarak, got married early and suffers from a troubled relationship with her husband, who keeps hitting and yelling at her, and seeks to marry off their daughter, who is no more than fifteen years old. Amal wears the niqab, which is very religiously and socially strict.
The third sister is Samah, played by the actress Hanan Al-Helou. She does not look like her two sisters at all. She married a rich man, but her relationship with him is tainted by apathy, so Samah always does not suspect that he has multiple relationships with other women. The younger sister is Khitam, and her role is played by Maryam Pasha, who decided to leave her family in Amman and go to Dubai, and live with her boyfriend, which the whole neighborhood knew regarding, so her father decided to boycott her, and the neighborhood decided to try her.
Four different models of women in our societies, presented through this film in a “slick” manner, and sometimes in a direct manner, as a scene in which Samah talks to her sister Khitam regarding her sexual relationship with her boyfriend, and whether she feels pleasure and happiness, a scene that she felt was somewhat strange. Something regarding the course of events, especially since it came in such a direct way. But I come back and think, isn’t it time to address these sensitive topics in a kind of directness so that the conversation becomes more familiar?
The story of the sisters’ re-acquaintance following all these years is in my opinion the most distinctive in the film. The moments when they were arguing or quarreling between them is what reminds them of the difficult life they live, and their desire to return to the embrace of their father’s warm house, but they certainly always remember that blame is also It falls on the father and mother in the way they raise them and obey society in order to stop “people’s talk.”
The characters had a kind of extremism in presentation, easy to anticipate what would happen, but the film succeeded on the other hand in presenting characters who transformed from two-dimensionality at the beginning of the film, to characters with multiple dimensions with the completion of the story. This leads me specifically to the character of Zainab, the older sister, who was calm and peaceful at the beginning of the film, but with the development of events we find this anger within her that escalates little by little, to present us with a completely different character from what we started with, and frankly, Farah Bseisu performed in it one of the most beautiful roles in her life (possibly far from Mo’s mother figure and the magic of olive oil in her hands).
My reservation regarding the film is that it carried a lot of themes beyond what a movie might handle. He discussed women’s issues in our societies through the characters of the four girls, but he also touched on the sidelines, even if with a quick mention, of other issues, which are major issues, and it is not easy to summarize them in one or two sentences. The most prominent of those issues that the film quickly touched upon is the issue of homosexuals, and the issue of the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian.
But in general, the presence of a movie like “Daughters of Abd al-Rahman” is very important because it creates this space in which the focus is on women’s stories, and the issues that affect them directly in a society that still considers women to be the wife of so-and-so, the sister of so-and-so, and the daughter of so-and-so, while she is In fact, a personality independent of any so-and-so.
