Over the whine of classroom air-conditioners at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, one can often hear the sound of gunfire emanating from neighboring Ramallah. The shots, fired into the air in celebration, signal not a terrorist strike, but a wedding.
Filmmaker Sherine Salama documents one such union in “Wedding in Ramallah,” which opened last fall’s Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City. Her film tells the story of Bassam, a Palestinian émigré to the United States born in Ramallah, and Mariam, his fiancé from the tiny West Bank village of Der Amr. It follows them from their first face-to-face meeting only a month before their arranged marriage, through their physical separation and the trials of Mariam’s visa applications, to their eventual reunification in Cleveland, Ohio.
At the film’s New York City premier, Salama, the daughter of Egyptian and Palestinian parents, said her goal was “to show how the occupation impacted daily life.” Yet the occupation’s effect is only one of many themes she interweaves as director, narrator and unseen protagonist. In less than two hours, her lens captures a microcosm of marriage, tradition, love, gender, and anguished immigrant experience
Bassam, made skeptical of love by a failed marriage to an American, hopes to find happiness with a pre-selected Palestinian bride. Beauty is not a priority for Bassam and his family. “Forget about the pretty one,” his cousin Maha quotes from the deliberations about which daughter Bassam should marry. “We said: ‘We want the good one.’”
Mariam and Bassam’s wedding celebration in January of 2000 is raucous and well attended. But soon after, Bassam must return to his job in America. He leaves Mariam at her in-law’s home, in the grip of a dreary routine—cooking, cleaning and waiting. In order to get the visa she needs to join him, she wades through reams of bureaucratic paperwork and endures frustrating trips across Israeli checkpoints to the American consulate in Jerusalem. Despite these aggravations, Mariam still idealizes the United States. When Salama shows her footage she took of Bassam in his small Cleveland apartment, Mariam exclaims how perfect America is, and her eyes gleam with longing.
Mariam’s frustration in Ramallah is exceeded by her sister-in-law Sinora’s. Married at 15 to Bassam’s brother, Moussa, Sinora has been waiting eight years to join her husband in New York. But Moussa seems in no hurry to reunite; his heart is with his American children from a previous marriage.
Bassam’s emigration to America, we eventually learn, was a result of the conflict. Accused of membership in Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement in 1986, he was beaten by Israeli soldiers and forced to leave the country.
For Mariam and those remaining in Ramallah, roadblocks and curfews mar daily life. Israeli army rockets jolt the family in the night as they huddle on the floor in the darkness. No wonder then that Bassam and Mariam refer to “the Jews” and “the Jewish Army” with contempt and hatred. But Salama, confronted with vicious prejudices so central to the conflict that defines her film, remains silent. Her reluctance to challenge this bigotry is a serious drawback to an otherwise powerful work.
Salama’s interactions with Sinora and Moussa prove she has no qualms about exposing her characters’ other flaws. When the two husbands return to Ramallah to visit their wives, Moussa does not greet or address Sinora, who has spent the day in the salon and changed outfits at least twice in preparation for his arrival. As Sinora hides her rejection and tears from her family, we hear Salama give her comfort, as well as advice, from off-screen. Salama even tries to confront Moussa about his treatment of his wife. Though the discussion remains civil, Moussa, staring off vacantly into space and smoking as he talks, is quick to dismiss Salama’s challenges. “All this is shit,” he says. “Life is shit.”
Mariam finally joins Bassam in Cleveland and finds all is not as she had hoped. Bassam works two jobs, leaving her alone in the apartment from early morning until late at night. The home, whose digitized image filled her with yearning, is daunting in reality. Slowly, she teaches herself to use such mundane instruments as a cable television, a stove, and a vacuum cleaner. We see her massaging her temples as she endures a confounding, horrible noise in the kitchen—it is the smoke alarm set off by her cooking. Mariam longs to reveal to Sinora, so eager to come to America, the truth about life in this new land.
