Middle Eastern Film Studies

Promises Film Review  Directed by: Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, Carlos Bolado 2001 ‧ Political cinema/Documentary ‧ 1h 46m IMDB     Rotten Tomatoes 8.4/10                      96% My Rating  ✰✰✰✰ ✰    "Promises" is a deep and intimate look into the lives of young Israeli and Palestinian children living during a relative time of peace from 1997-2000 in an effort to try to bring young people together and realize they aren't so different from one another. It is one of the most humanizing and powerful documentaries I think I've seen yet because it doesn't focus too much on the complicated specifics of the politics and war between Israeli and Palestinian people and more so just shows an individual look at the reality of being a child in this harsh environment. This documentary is simultaneously both very hopeful but also brutally realistic in demonstrating how change for the people in Israel/Palestine will not come about easily. The do

Where Do We Go Now? Film Review Directed by Nadine Labaki 2011 ‧ Drama/Comedy-drama ‧ 1h 50m IMDB         Rotten Tomatoes       Roger Ebert 7.5/10                        52%                     2.5/4 My Rating  ✰✰✰✰  "Where Do We go Now?" is a wonderfully clever film dealing with real tragedies about the religious violence and tensions between Muslims and Christians in an isolated village in Lebanon.  The village this film is set in is surrounded by land mines and only one pathway to travel out of the village as well as a graveyard of people killed in the religious violence between Christians and Muslims. This sets a bit of an uneasy atmosphere where the people of this village try to avoid the events from the past from occurring again and manage to peacefully coexist with one another. That is, until outside media comes into the town and propagates information about violence between different religious sects happening outside of the town which cau