Eyes of a Thief (2014)

What a beautiful movie!

Sick Product of a Sick System

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Eyes of a Thief (2014) is a Palestinian film written and directed by Najwa Najjar. Kal Naga is played by the Egyptian star Khaled Abol Naga. Kal, a water engineer, has spent ten years in an Israeli prison. He returns home to find that his wife is dead, and his daughter is missing.With bitter determination, Kal tracks his daughter to her most likely location, and believes he has found her under the care of a woman named Lila (Souad Massi). His daughter is a tough, no-nonsense young woman. She is portrayed brilliantly by Malak Ermileh. The acting of all three leads was excellent.What we all want is for Kal to marry Lila and live happily ever after with his daughter and his new wife. This isn't Hollywood, this is Occupied Palestine, which isn't a place where a happy ending is guaranteed from the start. The plot has twists and turns that we don't expect. You'll have to see the movie to find out what they are.We saw the film at the excellent Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. It was shown as part of the wonderful Witness Palestine Rochester Film Festival. After the movie, there was Q&A with Khaled Abol Naga via Skype. Naga is perfectly fluent in English, and his remarks were very helpful. Even though he's not Palestinian, he understands and sympathizes with the Palestinian people. Every woman I spoke to admired his looks--comments ranged from "drop-dead gorgeous" to "impossibly handsome." The good news is that he can also really act.This film will work well on the small screen. Watch it on DVD or BluRay if you can't see it in a theater. The movie has a modest IMDb rating of 6.9. It's much better than that.

In this well written and directed excellent movie, Najwa Najjar avoids to a certain extent the temptation to get involved in the typical political debate between Israel and its foes as the drama centers around a man (starring the famous Egyptian actor Khaled Abu Naga), whose one life target after spending long years in prison becomes nothing other than finding his missing daughter. As the story does not forget to include a sweet and innocent touch of romance, this excellent piece of art which depicts the day by day life under the longest military occupation in modern history, also tackles many issues that Palestinians face as they try to move on with their lives under military occupation, be it the shortage of water supplies that the Israelis control, the need for jobs, or the existence of collaborators among them as well as underground resistance fighters, let alone a fact that many westerners seem to miss, that the Palestinian people are Moslems and Christians !!. Anyone who watches "Eyes of a Thief", will not only learn a thing or two about life in the occupied Palestinian territories, but will definitely find himself enjoying a very good movie.

I went to see this film with low expectations and I was very pleasantly surprised. The casting of the main male character was excellent. He was a man of few words but his emotional state was easily understood. The children in the films were brilliant. The story kept me on my toes and I was surprised few times by its twist. The combination of Israeli soldiers harassments and the water theft are themes that were well picked as few of the ways Israel controls lives of Palestinians. The love story was not well developed but that is also symbolic of how Palestinian society has been stunted due to many decades of oppressive occupation. Editing, casting and dialogue were well executed. Overall I strongly recommend this film as a thriller and as a window to a reality that is unknown to many.

Sad to say, Eyes of a Thief is not a very accomplished film. The performances are uneven, with the worst the male lead who doesn't act so much as pose prettily. The plot is shallow and predictable. There is no layering of significance, nothing beyond the basic melodrama. We know immediately that the spirited Malak is the hero's long lost daughter, that he will win her foster mother and that the older man who wants to marry her will be exposed as a villain. Villainy, of course, is collaboration with the Israelis in their theft of the Palestinians' water.The latter argument is, of course, a well-disproven calumny, not that that matters in the Palestinians' propaganda campaign against Israel's very existence. Along with: "All we want to do is plant our potatoes."But the film's most serious lie is the total omission of any references to Islam or its aberrant terrorist extreme. Instead the hero is a Christian, indeed the heroic sniper who offed 11 Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in 2002. There are two problems here. One is why the villain thinks that information would demonize the Christian marksman among the Palestinians. The guy would be a hero. Two, Israel is the only guarantor of Christian freedom and life in the whole Middle East. Everywhere else Muslims are slaughtering Christians and conversions to Christianity and attacking their churches. As a historic film is as much about the time it's made as the time it's set (see Aristotle's distinction between mere History and the more meaningful Fiction), this misrepresentation of the religious dynamic invalidates the film entirely. In comparison with Israel's Gett, the Mauritanian Timbuktu and the Iranian Today (see my separate blogs) Eyes of a Thief is simply third-rate. It does the Palestinians no good in perpetuating their present painful impasse.