Product Description

Mona’s wedding day is the saddest day of her life. She knows that once she crosses the border between Israel and Syria to get married, she will never be allowed back to her beloved family in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. Once you cross the border there is no way back and at the end of a long day, the family, the government and military officials and all those gathered on both sides of the border find themselves facing an uncertain future, trapped in No-Man’s land between Israel and Syria.

Awards:
Winner 2004 Montreal World Film Festival; FIPRESCI Prize
Winner 2004 Montreal World Film Festival; Grand Prix des Amériques
Winner 2004 Montreal World Film Festival; People’s Choice Award
Winner 2004 Montreal World Film Festival; Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
Winner 2004 Locarno International Film Festival; Audience Award
Winner 2004 Flanders International Film Festival; Audience Award
Winner 2004 Flanders International Film Festival; Best Screenplay

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14054 in DVD
• Brand: KOCH ENT.
• Released on: 2006-06-06
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, Content/Copy-Protected CD, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, Hebrew, Russian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 97 minutes

Features

• In this moving drama from Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, a young Israeli woman, engaged to a Syrian man, faces the fact that marriage to her betrothed in Syria will mean she can never return to Israel. But when she gets to the border and looks set to begin a new life, some surprises await her. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN Rating: NR Age: 741952307198 UPC: 7419523

Amazon.com
A statement about borders--and the absurdity of bureaucracy--The Syrian Bride strides sucessfully between tragedy and comedy. Mona (olive-eyed Clara Khoury, Rana's Wedding) is the bride. She lives in Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights. According to the opening title, "Druze loyalty is split between Syria and Israel." Tallel (Derar Sliman), her husband-to-be, resides in Damascus. She has never met him--though she has seen him on TV (he's a soap star). Once Mona crosses into Syria, she won't be allowed to return. Hence her wedding day begins on a somber note. Mona’s family has problems of its own. Political dissident father Hammed (Makram J. Khoury, Clara's real-life paterfamilias) has recently been released from jail, and it looks as if he may be sent back again (for defying parole). Older sister Amal (Paradise Now’s Hiam Abbass, who steals the show with her slow-burning intensity) is experiencing her own marital strife, while her daughter is seeing a pro-Israeli Druze. As for Mona’s brothers, Hammed refuses to speak to Hattem (Eyad Sheety), who moved to Russia eight years ago and has returned for the wedding, non-Muslim wife and son in tow. And just in from shady business dealing in Italy is Marwan (Ashraf Barhom), the family screw-up, i.e. a gap-toothed charmer devoid of scruples. Directed by Israel's Eran Riklis (Borders ) and co-written by Suha Arraf, a Palestinian-Israeli, The Syrian Bride takes an occasionally schematic, if admirably even-handed look at ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Customer Reviews

A great production on Arab society
The Syrian Bride is one of a string of well done European-Israeli movie productions. The producers and the cast are mostly Arab Israelis. While the movie might seem to carry political connotations it is in fact a sociological masterpiece.
The setting is Majdal Shams - the biggest town of the Golan Heights - a Syrian territory which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981. The characters are Druze, a Middle Eastern sect that endorses a peculiar religious belief borrowed mainly from Greek mythology, Hinduism and Islam.
The movie highlights the national loyalty of the Golan Druze, which has remained presumably pro-Syria. It also depicts the difficulty this community endures as it lives on different sides of a land controlled by two enemy countries: Syria and Israel.
But the movie is not only about national affiliations and living hardships. It is an emotionally powerful film that penetrates into the deep sociological makeup of the Druze community in specific and the Middle Eastern community in general.
First, the wedding of the bride, Mona, to a fianc? she never met, exposes the fragility of arranged marriages. Mona not only had to surrender to an unknown fate as she marries Talal who lives on the Syrian side, she also had to give up on all of her family and neighborhood since once she left the Israel-occupied territory to Syria, she would never be allowed back. The scene highlights the high risks Arab brides take when they settle for arranged matches that they would never be able to give up on in the future.
But the film does not leave the question of the arranged marriages unanswered as it introduces Mona's elder sister, Amal, who had earlier settled for such an arrangement and now lives under the misery of a conventional husband with whom she does not share anything except for their two daughters.
The rigid Druze marriage system does not affect only women, however. Another sibling of Mona and Amal, Hattem, had been married to a Russian for eight years. Since he had taken up a wife from outside the community, Hatem was being cast out not only by his father, but also by the whole community. The movie cleverly depicts how Hatem's father, Hameed, was under pressure from the community's elders to boycott his son.
The film is certainly one of the best works in this regard about one of the Arab world's most undiscovered sociological aspects. The acting is great and the production is very much up to standard. I recommend you own it and add it to your library of best foreign films.

Borderlines . . .
While open hostilities currently prevail between Israel and its neighbors, this film tells of a relatively more peaceful time in the recent past when the Golan Heights have been separated from the rest of Syria by Israeli occupation. Like the wall dividing East and West Berlin, the border fences, check points, and no man's land keep apart members of families, whose lives must now accommodate political differences and national interests originating in cities far away and played out in bureaucracies that are mindless, petty, and impersonal. Against this background, the characters in this film attempt to have a wedding in which the bride and groom come from opposite sides of the border.

While this particular boundary crossing is fraught with difficulties, the bride's family has many inner divisions of its own, between father and son, husband and wife, and father and daughter. Meanwhile, the father of the bride is repeatedly confronted by an uncompromising Israeli army officer and the village's pro-Syrian sheikhs are delivering ultimatums of their own. There is enough dramatic conflict for an Altman movie. The Syrian bride of the title eventually is revealed as the unhappily married wife of a traditionally conservative husband who wants to keep her from pursuing a professional career.

One of the best dramatically honest films I've seen in a long time. The DVD includes an informative making-of featurette, which explains something of the complexity of a multi-national film project shot in the Middle East - and at the wrong time of year. Israeli-born Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, who plays the sister of the bride, is wonderful.

a big story about an even bigger issue!
The best thing about The Syrian Bride is that while it tells the story of one family, it also tells an even bigger story about how an entire population of people are caught in a political no-man's land in northern Israel.

At the center of both of these stories is Mona, a woman, living in the Golan Heights of Israel, who is planning to marry a Syrian, living in Syria. At issue is that 'once she crosses the border into Syria, there is no coming back' to her Druze village nor her family. The bigger issue is the fact that this all exists, and the Druze people are caught in this no-man's land.

That being said, this film is emotionally powerful, and even a non-foreign film fan will get caught in the storyline about a wedding, and about family. The acting is fantastic, the photography is superb, and I highly suggest that while this has nothing to do with My Big Fat Greek Wedding in any way at all, I kept thinking about that classic as I watched The Syrian Bride. I believe this is destined to be a classic itself....all it needs is time.