Details
Ameer Fakher Eldin - Syria- 2021 - 112" - Arabic - English subtitles
When are you coming home, father? What's taking so long?
By all accounts, Adnan is a failure. Having dropped out of medical school years earlier, he moved back to the occupied Golan Heights to marry and start an orange farm. However, the farm doesn't bear fruit, and he struggles to be present for his wife and daughter, instead finding solace at the bottom of a bottle. By night he parks his car by the Israel-Syria border fence, listening to the sounds of civil war on the other side. But when he sees an injured man come across the border, he is forced to confront the realities of the occupation directly.
Borrowing its title from Camus' classic short story about a social outcast living in colonial Algiers, "The Stranger" is a slow meditation on alienation within the context of a perpetual foreign occupation. The community, set in the midst of a cold winter, is subjected to a constant threat of violence by the Israeli state, and Adnan's depression and inability to connect with others is explicitly explored through this lense.