After a car accident that claimed her mother's (Rebecca Calder) life, but spared her own, Rebecca (Miley Locke) relocates to Israel with her father Michael (Johnny Harris) to live in his deceased parents' house. In this completely new environment, abruptly cut off from her life in England and facing a new language, new school and her father's futile attempts to fight depression, Rebecca deals with her grief all alone. This is the core story of “A House in Jerusalem”, a debut feature by Palestinian film director, producer and cinematographer Muayad Alayan that has its world premiere in the Limelight program of International Film Festival Rotterdam.
A House in Jerusalem is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
The script is co-written by the director and his brother Rami Musa Alayan and is influenced by their family's experience. As the residents of the city which expelled its Arab citizens including their parents to live in camps after the battle of Jerusalem in 1948, they handle that part of history with care. The story kicks off when Michael and Rebecca move to a house with a similar tragic past, haunted by a ghost of a living person visible only to the girl, who can't leave her childhood behind. She doesn't remember how long she's been in hiding from ‘the men with weapons who came to get them', but it becomes pretty obvious what and when it happened as soon as Rebecca starts digging for information about the previous house owners on the internet.
The connection between two girls of about same age provides a slow introduction to wrongs committed in the past that brought long lasting consequences. The narrative is constructed around the idea that children are capable of building bridges between cultures, and the power to heal wounds in a way adults fail to do. That only one fraction of a person's soul is ghostified, stuck in the past and unaware of its other existence is an interesting concept, which would have its problems in a strictly genre movie.
When Rasha (Sheherazade Makhoul Farrell) visits Rebecca for the first time, it's to get back her doll fished out from the well she's living in. She is devastated about the doll's loss, and blames her new friend for it. The doll becomes an instrument in juxtaposing the parallelly existing worlds, but also a vessel to connect the past and the present.
Believing that the grieving, lonely ghost looks for her mother Rebecca traces down the woman in Bethlehem camp who she thinks could be her, but she is shocked when told that this dollmaker whose traditional, folklore-inspired dolls nobody creates anymore, never had children. Through the exchange between the old lady and her curious visitor, bits and pieces of traditional craft are revealed, particularly about the Palestinian embroidery, typical of the region. In her venture through the camp, Rebecca discovers the puppet theaters, but also that everything in the gated community is monitored by the authorities. It's little details like those that make “A House in Jerusalem” a warm and honest film.
First-time cinematographer Sebastian Bock uses intense play with shadows and a dusty color palette to create a sense of threat when there isn't one as part of the plot-twisting plan in the film's first half. The world outside the house is much more colorful, and the light softer regardless of the time of the day. Discreet and wonderfully in tune with the film's atmosphere is the original music composed by Alex Simu, who knows when to start and when to take a break.
Miley Lock fluidly delivers her role of a hurting young girl who tries to do a good deed, and in the cast as the whole, she stands out.
