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Honolulu Star-Advertiser · Honolulu, Hawaii · 28 February 2014

CP-2014-023

Masterful ‘Omar’ dives deep into notion of conflict

Colin Covert, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Masterful ‘Omar’ dives deep into notion of conflict — Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 28 February 2014
Honolulu Star-Advertiser · Honolulu, Hawaii · 28 February 2014

Transcribed from the clipping

“A riveting blend of thriller and romance elements, ‘Omar’ grabs you from the very first image. A fit, energetic young man climbs a knotted rope to the top of Israel’s 25-foot separation wall, the concrete curtain isolating West Bank Palestinians from Israelis. Hand over hand he makes his way to the top of the looming barrier. The long shot shows there’s nothing to break his descent if he slips. You watch, stomach knotted, gripped by fear that he’ll plummet to the roadway below… Nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language film, ‘Omar’ is the latest entry from Palestinian writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, whose 2005 ‘Paradise Now,’ a character study of suicide bombers, was also up for that prize. Abu-Assad packs his film with richly layered characters and vivid visuals. Omar routinely climbs the fence to get to his childhood friend Tarek’s house. He’s there less to hang out with his buddy and their amusing sidekick Amjad than to pass clandestine love poems to Tarek’s pretty kid sister, Nadia.… Abu-Assad draws wonderful performances from an ensemble of unknowns. Adam Bakri’s Omar and Leem Lubany’s Nadia in particular allow vivid emotions to escape their characters’ self-protective facades. The lone professional in the cast, Waleed Zuaiter as Rami, is simultaneously humane and sinister. Abu-Assad borrows from sources as diverse as Shakespeare and Mario Puzo to create this world of interconnected, endlessly escalating injustices. There is no pat sermonizing here, but no lack of indignation, either. The villain in this universe of ethical ambiguity and psychological nuance isn’t Israel. It’s the fever of short-sightedness, duplicity and pack mentality that infects every character. Yet each has his or her share of integrity.… The veteran Israeli agent Rami turns Omar against his friends, yet treats him with an empathy and apparent openness no one else offers… It’s surely no accident that the names of Omar and Rami are near-mirror images. ‘Omar’ leaves it up to us to decide who is more worthy. In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles.”

Photograph caption

“Omar (Adam Bakri) is a young Palestinian man without a country, who suddenly finds himself at odds with his clique of friends and with the woman he loves in Hany Abu-Assad’s ‘Omar.’” · Adopt Films

Context added by this archive

A four-star review by the same critic whose longer interview with the director ran in Minneapolis twelve days earlier. The reassurance appears again, as it did in two reviews of the director’s previous film nine years before: the villain, the reader is told, is not Israel. What the critic notices first about the film is a boy climbing a wall to deliver love poems.

Cite this item

"Masterful ‘Omar’ dives deep into notion of conflict," Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 28 February 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-023. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-023

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2014-023.

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