In 'Door to the Sun,' love triumphs over Palestinian history

The story is about Palestinians, not the Palestinian cause, the director said.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Arab filmmakers and intellectuals are increasingly turning to fiction to help their societies clear away the fog of idealized longing and romanticized revolution to deal more pragmatically with the present. In his film "The Door to the Sun," Egyptian-born director Yousry Nasrallah uses a novel to retrace the melancholy epic of Palestinian history.
The 4 1/2-hour film is based on a 1998 book by Elias Khoury, a Lebanese Palestinian literary editor and writer, and literature professor at New York University. Khoury's fictional story is gleaned from five years of interviews with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, as well as from accounts offered by Arab and Israeli historians alike.
Written in Arabic, the book has been translated into Hebrew, French and German. The film was shown this year at film festivals in Cannes and New York, and has opened in Beirut, Bahrain and Paris. It is part of the D.C. International Film Festival.
"This is a work of fiction, but it is not a fairy tale," Nasrallah, 52, said in an interview. "This is one of the first novels that writes about Palestinians and not about the Palestinian cause, and it talks about individuals and how they survived."
Enduring love
"Door to the Sun" is about a love story that endures for more than 50 years, beginning in Galilee in the 1940s. Younes marries Nahila but goes into exile, presumably to become a fighter, leaving Nahila to raise a family in the shadow of Israelis living nearby.
They meet occasionally at a hideaway on the outskirts of the village, their disrupted lives briefly rejoined in a stone cave whenever he manages to journey across the border. The book's title refers to the opening of their cave and is a metaphor for the life they cobbled together there with chaos all around them.
Over the years, their relationship triumphs over history: the establishment of the Israeli state, exile, the involvement of Palestinian fighters in the Lebanese civil war, the hardships faced by the residents of Galilee and the risks of guerrilla operations when Younes crosses the Israeli border.
Her neighbor
At one point, as Nahila lectures her husband about daydreaming, she quotes Avi, an Israeli to whom she sells olives and wild thyme she gathers from the field and sells to survive. Her husband questions her with hostility about the Israeli. "What is he like, this Avi?" Matter-of-factly, Nahila responds with a shrug: "He is like everyone, like all the people we know."
The first part of the film evokes bittersweet memories of the couple's paradise lost against the backdrop of the impotency of Arab armies. The second half harshly criticizes what Palestinians did wrong and seeks to deconstruct the futile myths that politicians have exploited over the years, which led to defeats, among them the humiliating 1982 departure of Palestinian fighters from the port of Beirut.
"That part is much more intense," Nasrallah said. "It is about what Arabs did to Palestinians and what Palestinians did to themselves. This is the story of my generation. This is about the forty- to fifty-somethings. This is a generation that has not told its story yet, and this is what we are doing."
Plots revenge
In one scene, Nahila tells her husband that their son died after falling from a tree in a kibbutz where he was playing with Israeli children. Seeking revenge, Younes heads to an Israeli settlement planning to blow it up.
Nasrallah juxtaposes imagined scenes of the explosions and billowing fires, accompanied by the screams of children from the would-be attack by Younes, who ends up defusing the device and walking away into the night. Nasrallah said this scene addresses the issue of suicide attacks and the cult of death that has grown around Palestinian problems.
"The idea is not to encourage people to die or take their own life. All our work as thinkers, filmmakers and novelists has been to give some kind of alternative to violence or taking one's own life," he said.
"It is a film about emancipation, of individuals redefining themselves outside the framework of victim and victimizer. They are accountable to one another as humans. This is where democracy begins."