Wajib
(Wajib)

With its air of a family film – in which Mohammad (Abu Shadi) and Saleh Bakri (Shadi) with a natural complicity take the roles of a father and son who have grown apart, Wajib could give the impression of walking on already covered ground. Far from it! What could be taken as a weakness in the film quickly becomes its strength. A son exiled in Italy, where he works as an architect, goes to join his father, a professor firmly rooted in his home town of Nazareth, to help deliver invitations to family and friends (they are many and no one must be forgotten) for his young sister’s marriage. A truly memorable adventure for the first, and a troubling return to his roots for the second, a tour of discovery in the form of a duty to be accomplished both for a father and the daughter still living with him, each as keen as the other to honour the relations in the community. Rediscovering each other as they travel together, the two men, as a sort of reconciliation, recall the intimate political contradictions that set them at odds. In their wake, with greater subtlety Wajib etches a composite, complex and sensitive portrait of the situation of the Palestinians in Nazareth. JB