Waiting for Godot?
Waiting, by Rashid Masharawi, a French and Palestinian movie produced by Silkroad and sold by Les Films du Losange, has met many distributors in Venice, where it was presented within the ambit of the Venice-Days.
By choosing to make a film about a weary Palestinian director in charge of auditioning for a National Palestinian Theatre with a famous TV interviewer and her cameraman, Rashid Masharawi allows us to discover the reality of a split nation (in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon) in a refreshingly ironic way. Waiting is an absurd road movie, as the witty dialogues indicate from the beginning: indeed, 'a State without a National Theatre' makes no sense, but neither does 'a National Theatre without a State'.
Furthermore, in every refugee camp, the casting team realises that the people who wait to be auditioned are less interested in acting than in communicating with family members they have not seen for years and whom they have been waiting forever to meet again. They therefore come to ask each applicants to play that, and just wait in front of the camera, which they are unable to do, because they 'need direction', as one of the refugee points out. The absurdity of awaiting something unidentified is underlined by the half-sentences the TV presenter repeats for sound tests: 'Arafat says there should be some improvements in the near future..., the Israeli government believes a compromise is on the way...'
In Waiting, Palestine itself, just like the 'National theatre', appears as a beautiful Utopia. Outside of Palestine, the memory of it is an idealised projection. Besides, refugees in Jordan and refugees in Lebanon have a completely different life and history, the former arrived in 1967 and mixed with the locals, while the latter have been waiting since 1948, and, as they say in the end, are 'still here'. In these words like in his film, although Masharawi underlines the fallacy, he gives Waiting a profoundly hopeful resonance. As a little Lebanese girl says, 'I have a dream...'
(Translated from French)
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