When I Saw You

When I Saw You (Annemarie Jacir, 2012)

Sad reality of freedom fighters. Sad reality of the lives the mothers, children, and elders had to live through. Strong movie with a motive. Personally loved it. May they be free soon...

I liked and disliked the movie equally. I liked that it shows the Palestinians strength and want to free and return to their land. Another thing I liked about it is the open ending to the movie( personally i think they died). What I disliked is that it has a very narrow focus, it only shows how and why he left the camp, and that he went to the freedom fighters, where he stayed. I believe that it needed more action and a bigger story, for example it could have showed him returning home, or joining the fighters and going ahead in time where he is older and able to return home. Thank you.

The movie was good and bad. the person who made this film had a good idea they could have made it better i didn't care for the acting of the child and the story line. This what basically happens is that he has trouble in the camp then goes decides to go back home in Palestine he meets fighters that want to go back to Palestine and fight for their land then he goes to the borders and the movie ends. Yes, i liked the open ending because i allows the audience to decide what happens. I think they die but the ending gave me goose bumps. I hope people agree with me because i would rate this movie 6 out of 10.

The film is a stylish, well-acted piece of agitprop, with fine cinematography and pretty good production values overall, and with a core plot line that is deeply touching, reflecting reality as it must have been lived by millions in the times (just after the 67 war) in which it is set. Until the final sequence, which is more than over the top and breaks with the fairly rigorous realism of the rest, it avoids a lot of the overemphatic character drawing and acting that afflicts so much Arab filmmaking. There have been Palestinian films of yet greater subtlety, but the filmmaker is to be commended for leaving the Israelis offscreen (save for some ghostly Land Rovers out on patrol). The story line starts with the intimate, day-to-day realities of life in the refugee camps, made to appear pretty much like life anywhere at first and then, progressively and with commendable restraint, shown to be unbearable. Tarek, the small boy at the center of the film, apparently both dyslexic and mathematically gifted, is perhaps just a little too adorable, but the young actor is well-directed and mostly believable in his childish obsession with returning home and finding his father, oblivious to danger or to the reality involved in getting there. His mother is superbly acted, showing devotion to her son, but a wide range of other human feelings, including fed-upness, as well, all done with great understatement. For many, there will be some wistful nostalgia (and for others, perhaps, snorts of derision) at the depiction of a then-embryonic Palestinian resistance in which young men and women mix freely as comrades, and in which the only Book in use is the little red one of Chairman Mao. Not a hint of piety in the whole film, not even a call to prayer in the distance. Different times.

Trailer—When I Saw You