MovieChat Forums > Lamma shoftak (2014) Discussion > My thoughts (possible spoilers)

My thoughts (possible spoilers)

posted 10 years ago by PoppyTransfusion
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The incidental music of the film give it a 60's vibe, which sets the tone for a universality to Tarek's experiences. Of course they are anything but ... and yet in such a situation, is what happens to Tarek unusual?

Tarek is a mathematical prodigy who suffers with literacy and reading. He's living in a refugee camp in Jordan and blind to the fate this means for him and his mum until an older woman tells him that she's lived at the camp 20 years. This blows his mind.

He's missing his dad and looks out for him each time a truck arrives with more refugees. He feels the need to flee the camp and try and return home to look for his dad. To have his own bathroom and toilet. To be taught by a nice female teacher instead of the ugly male teacher at the Palestinian camp.

En route home he meets Layth, played by Saleh Bakri , who is a fedayeen - a freedom fighter. Tarek ends up joining the fedayeen because he wants to go home. His life at the camp is funny and educative.

Tarek's mother comes looking for him. She ends up with the fedayeens and appears to join them too. In the end she is doing it for her son though she misses her husband very much.

The film ends with a heart-in-mouth moment that is not resolved. Tarek runs to the border between Israel and Jordan that is patrolled and across which he needs to cross to return home. His mother runs after him, takes his hand and they run together. There the film ends. What becomes of them is left to viewer to decide.

Tarek misses his father. He misses his house with its bathroom that contrasts with the communal toilet at the refugee camp. He joins the fedayeens unwittingly but embraces them as they give him his culture as a Palestinian. He no longer adheres to what his mother says and replaces her authority with a father figure - Abu Akram - the camp's leader, who is very funny. There's nothing in Tarek's psychology that suggests he differs from other children on the periphery of adolescence. This matters because we are to resonate with the plight of the Palestinians as they are people just like us but for their need to take up arms in order to return home. In the light if his situation, Tarek is normal and his behaviour reasonable.

I give my respect to those who have earned it; to everyone else, I'm civil.

[–] benman46 9 years ago

I much prefer the opening section of the film in the refugee camp. The opening scenes convey a pervasive sense of aimlessness and casual squalor, Tarek joining a long queue for, I assume, the camp's only, quite disgusting male toilet. Tarek dreaming of the time when he can return to his home and father. When a woman at the camp tells Tarek she has been there for twenty years, this precipitates him to leave the camp and return home. It is the section where he enters the fedayeen camp I have a problem with. It comes across more as a holiday camp then a place where men and women are being trained for action. It is a place where they spend more time playing card games, listening to the radio and dancing, and Tarek becomes a mascot for the group and is taught to play the oud. There is no real sense of danger. The other thread of Tarek being a sort of mathematical wunderkind is never developed. So on the whole I was disappointed with the movie. The ending was a killer though.

[–] PoppyTransfusion 9 years ago

The camp is seen as Tarek experiences it. For him it's a fun and positive experience.

The other thread of Tarek being a sort of mathematical wunderkind is never developed.

Isn't this part of the film's point? His talent and personhood cannot be nurtured and, as he might be killed at the end, so it remains undeveloped.

I was a little disappointed with the film when I watched it but as I was putting my thoughts together afterwards I realised that a lot had been achieved via a coming-of-age format. The ending was very sad.

A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.