ARABIAN SIGHTS
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

Between Heaven and Earth

NAJWA NAJJAR
Palestine, Iceland, Luxembourg, 2019
93 minutes, Color

A middle-class Palestinian couple, Salma (Mouna Hawa) and Tamer (Firas Nassar), must drive from their West Bank home to Nazareth, in Israel, to file the necessary paperwork for a divorce. With that unhappy premise, Najwa Najjar (Oscar® entry Eyes of a Thief) creates an enthralling weave of road movie, love story, and mystery. Within Israel's documentation requirements, the Beirut-born Tamer has some explaining to do about his father's "last known address," sending the couple chasing a history Tamer didn't know he had. For an international audience, there is something to be discovered in every shot of Najjar's stunning film. For Palestinians, it holds stories not often told of sidelined intellectuals today and of Arab Jews' fate at the Jewish state's founding. Thus does one couple's personal conflict contain multitudes, their journey revealing the emotional and moral compromises a lover, a village, and a state can make to survive.—Judy Bloch

In Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English with English subtitles