Ranas Wedding

Plot

The Film depicts a 17-year-old girl called Rana that is subjected to a crucial life-changing decision at a very young age. Because her father decides to leave Palestine and relocate to Egypt, due to the chaotic working and living conditions, to try to maintain a decent living to support his family. She wakes up one day and finds a letter from her father informing her about his difficult decision adding to it, he also involves her in his plans and provides her with two choices, either to travel with him to Egypt and carry on with her education there under his watchful eye, or stay in Palestine and get married to make sure that someone is guarding her in his absence. Although the options seem fairly reasonable, there is a twist, her father will only allow her to marry one of the men that he has mentioned on a list with the letter, because they are the most reputable and trustworthy men in Jerusalem, as well as, she has to take that critical decision just 10 hours before her father departs from Palestine.

Rana is left shocked and disappointed with the options, after reading the letter she decides to run away from home in search of her lover Khalil that her father does not approve of because of his career, therefore, does not include him in the list of people she can marry. Rana desperately searches for Khalil leaving no home, family or friend unasked about his whereabouts to inform him about her critical situation. As she searches for him she is faced with many challenges along the way from Israeli soldiers, road blocks and physical conflicts between Palestinian and Israeli soldiers. After hours of searching she finally finds his location and rushes to him, finding him in the theatre, working on directing one of his plays.

At last she finds him and tells him everything she has been through the past few hours, and confidently asks him for his hand in marriage, rushing him to take a decision in order to find a sheikh to marry them before her father sets off. Together they set out on an even longer journey to reach the sheikh and her father to approve of their marriage. They were able to find the sheikh and drove him to her father’s house to convince him of the marriage, that he could not object to without any rightful excuse according to Islamic law, the sheikh supported Rana's decision and told her father that the marriage must proceed. Her father giving into her wishes unwillingly approves, Rana and Khalil then set out on another extremely tiresome mission, getting their papers and preparing themselves for their wedding ceremony.

At the end tension rises when the wedding is held at Rana's father's house while the sheikh has not shown up to do the ceremony and her dad is getting ready to leave. As she waits restlessly she finds out that the sheikh is stuck at a road block. Her father gets furious and waits no longer, ordering her to come with him in her wedding dress, leaving for Egypt. Riding in the car with her father and her family they pressure and persuade her father to go to the road block for his daughter, finally agreeing they arrive at the road block. When her father and Khalil read their vows in the car, her dad sympathetically gives her away to the man she loves, ending the love story with a heart-warming celebration on the streets of Jerusalem.

The film ends with the words of Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

Here on the slopes before sunset and at the gun-mouth of time,

Near orchards deprived of their shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
What the unemployed do:

Cast

Acting Credits

Production Credits

Production

The film was shot in East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Palestine. Produced in collaboration with the Netherlands and funded by the Palestinian Film Foundation. It was filmed during a critical time in the early months of the second Palestinian intifada. Hany Abu-Assad in an interview with journalist Sabah Haider, disucsses the challenges he faced when producing the film "For sure the intifada influenced the production because at the end of the film, reality is stronger than fiction. The occupation, the checkpoints — you don’t want them to interfere with your story but the ugliness of occupation influenced the look of film. As much as you might not want occupation to influence the making of the film, at the end it does influence it."

Critical reception

Box office

According to the website Box Office Mojo, in 2003 Rana's Wedding was ranked out of the top 50 wedding genre films produced in that year, and received a world ranking of 1108 in foreign films. The film was able to generate $10,604 after 1 year of release, screening in film festivals around the world. It was selected for screening at the International critics week in 2002 at the Cannes Film Festival.

Reviews

The film Rana's Wedding was reviewed by many notable newspapers, websites and critics and overall received pleasing reviews.

Awards and nominations

Awards

Nominations

Legacy