The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs with a mix of in-person and online availability from October 17 through October 26. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.
Palestinian cinema is a cinema of movement. Characters are always on the move. Sometimes the movement is forced, sometimes survivalist, sometimes only desired, occasionally liberatory. Gazan-born Rashid Masharawi’s new film Passing Dreams concentrates the metaphor of movement into a lost pigeon and a young boy’s attempt to recover his pet bird. He doesn’t soften the political reality in translating Palestinian subjugation onto non-human life, as allegories about human rights violations tend to go, but instead illuminates human life under the pain.
Technically, the bird is already gone and Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash) wants to find it, having heard from the local barber that pigeons return to their original owner. The young boy journeys with an empty bird cage on his own from his camp to Bethlehem to Jerusalem and eventually to Haifa to recover the lost pigeon. His uncle Kamal (Ashraf Barhom), an artisan storekeeper, lives in Bethlehem and gifted him the bird, but it turns out he got it from someone else who also got it from someone else…hence the road trip across Palestine. Kamal and his daughter Mariam (Emilia Massou), Sami’s older cousin and an aspiring journalist, unexpectedly chauffeur their kin from city to city in search of the bird. Reducing the politics of the Palestinian situation into an allegory of a boy tracing the steps of the bird through Palestine back to his own ancestral home powerfully simplifies the profound pains of exile and life under occupation.
Retracing the bird’s odyssey also lets Sami glean and retrace his family’s roots as his uncle teaches him (revealing a few inflection points regarding his uncle and mom’s troubled relationship in the process). The film culminates in a scenic nighttime overlook of Haifa—today one of Israel’s most segregated cities—and Sami’s uncle pointing in the direction of where Sami’s grandfather used to live. The backward progression from the camp to Bethlehem to Jerusalem to Haifa moves geographically through the story of Palestinian expulsion from the area. The nightlife of the port city, with distant cars and the blinking lights of factories evading detailed focus, memorializes the urban landscape into the family’s past like a fading memory. Sami, Mariam, and Kamal stand silhouetted before the city like ghosts as Kamal passes down their family heritage. Haifa only exists in the dark of night now.
The road trip reshapes not just Sami but also frees burdens weighing down on the rest of his family. It is as if the journey back home to where Sami’s grandfather’s hometown snaps their blood back into place and gives them the courage and resilience to iron out inter-family trauma. They decide as a family not to let internal squabbles caused by the Israeli occupation divide them and, in doing so, they turn the restoration of their own family into an act of resistance.
The strongest scenes come when the occupying forces interrupt the otherwise innocent road trip in search of a two-pound pet: the two checkpoints and when Sami’s cage (containing a paper bag of dry bird food) is confused for a “suspicious package,” prompting Israeli forces to employ small explosives to negate the all-threatening bird cage. The elementary-aged Sami releases a cry of lament for the “bird’s home” when the forces destroy it, inalienably relating the bird’s situation to Palestinians in exile, refugee camps, and unable to exercise their right of return. There is something absurd and idiotic underneath the evil in how Masharawi shoots these confrontations with the Israeli military presence. Everything on the Palestinian bodies unknown to the occupying forces makes them feel threatened and insecure. The preposterous overkill of weaponry used on the small avian house will come as no surprise to observers of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza; overkill seems to be the only language the IDF speaks.
Passing Dreams
2024
dir. Rashid Masharawi
85 min.
Screens Saturday, 10/18, 7:00pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the 2025 Boston Palestine Film Festival
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
