Syria came into the news in 2011 following an uprising against Bashar Assad, making it all the more interesting that "The Syrian Bride" takes place around the time when Assad took over from his late father. The movie looks at the coming marriage of a Druze woman in the Golan Heights (a formerly Syrian region occupied by Israel since the 1967 war) to a TV star from Damascus. After the marriage, the woman will have to move to Syria and her village will never allow her to return. But Israeli and Syrian bureaucracy looks certain to complicate things.
Criticism of the movie that I read is that it doesn't focus on the role that the Israel-Palestine conflict would likely play in the issue of the Golan Heights, and that it depicts the Israeli and Druze characters sympathetically while portraying the Syrian characters as buffoons. That IS a problem with the movie. But aside from that, director Eran Riklis takes a good look at the Kafkaesque bureaucracy plaguing the people in the Golan Heights. Life in this no-man's land comes across as a tough existence. It's also one of the few movies in which we see a strong Arab woman. Worth seeing, as long as you understand that it does pretty much gloss over any role that the Israel-Palestine conflict would have to play.
Criticism of the movie that I read is that it doesn't focus on the role that the Israel-Palestine conflict would likely play in the issue of the Golan Heights, and that it depicts the Israeli and Druze characters sympathetically while portraying the Syrian characters as buffoons. That IS a problem with the movie. But aside from that, director Eran Riklis takes a good look at the Kafkaesque bureaucracy plaguing the people in the Golan Heights. Life in this no-man's land comes across as a tough existence. It's also one of the few movies in which we see a strong Arab woman. Worth seeing, as long as you understand that it does pretty much gloss over any role that the Israel-Palestine conflict would have to play.