Darkness

It is not often I write about movies.  Even really good ones.  Sure I enjoyed Star Trek: Into Darkness, probably my favourite 3D movie yet.  And sure Blue Jasmine was really intense and gripping.

But it is not every day I get a new favorite film.  Talk about intense and gripping.  In a different way.  I didn’t find myself fighting to hold back tears at the dark moments, it was the love.

Love is something unique, sometimes hard to describe.  I’ve tried to describe it as a commitment.  An emotion to make someone else happy at all costs.  Sometimes to make them unhappy and to do what’s best for them.  And then you have varying degrees of love.  But now I feel I have a movie.  If someone asks me again to describe love; I’ll tell them, “Watch, Out in the Dark!”

Out in the Dark takes place in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.  It follows the meeting of a Jewish Israeli Roy (Michael Aloni) and Palestinian Nimer (Nicholas Jacob) from Ramallah.  They fall in Love.  The question is can it survive the conflict.

Even in a sense of the greater conflict, it is a beautiful film.  You certainly understand the sacrifices and the future huge sacrifices and compromise that must be made if the conflict will ever end.

But then you bring in the sensitivity of a gay relationship and intensity is at an extreme level, especially when being gay in Palestine is a sure path to death and at any given time over 300 GLBT Palestinians live illegally in an ‘enemy’ country, Israel.

So how does one survive and what does love got to do with it?  Only one way to find out, watch.  The award winning film by Michael Mayer is out on DVD on October 29th in the USA.