He’s also an unlicensed doctor who never finished his studies and now ekes a living tending to a dwindling orchard and a handful of scrappy-looking farm animals: a few chickens, an aging dairy cow whose milk comes clotted and bloody. Smoke, after all, drifts across borders and checkpoints at will, in a way that Adnan and his family cannot.Īdnan is husband to Layla (Amal Kais) and father to a young daughter (Cila Abusaleh). Like the ever-present rumble of far-off gunfire, they serve two purposes: making the dour and frequently drunk protagonist, Adnan (Ashraf Barhoum) look even lonelier and more lost, yet also reminding us of a natural world that doesn’t understand the area’s artificial and political divides. The overriding visual motifs that wend their way through the film, however, are the banks of mist that roll across the autumnal landscapes and the clouds of smoke that drift up from stoves and firesides.
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And there are shades of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s peerless “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” in how a tense car journey is relayed in a vast wide shot in which headlamps trace the S-bends of a hilly road at night. A far-off mountainside in fall, speckled with ruined dwellings, looks fleetingly like a Klimt pattern. An elderly woman folding linen is briefly a Vermeer. If not more so: Whenever Eldin’s screenplay gets too ponderous, when the pacing lags or the storytelling withholds too much, there is always a surprising composition to pin our attention.
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A granular depiction of oppression as a kind of inescapable inheritance handed down from father to son, with mothers and daughters its peripheral, persevering survivors, this striking debut makes its Golan Heights setting - the contested region bordering Syria, Lebanon and Israel - into a place of gulfs, grudges and unquiet ghosts.īut it is also attuned to the bleak grandeur of the landscapes in this cinematically little-seen region, and its rich, painterly images, appropriately hemmed into boxy Academy ratio, should make “The Stranger” as much a calling card for its cinematographer, Niklas Lindschau, as for Eldin. Gloom, deployed as a storytelling tactic, can exert a strange, unsettling pull when it’s as capably and beautifully conveyed as in Syrian director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s “ The Stranger,” recently announced as Palestine’s international Oscar entry.