Credits: screenplay: Rashid Masharawi; director of photography: Tarek Ben Abdallah, Nestor Sanz; editor: Pascal Chavance; music: Kais Sellami; sound: Issa Qumsyeh; production design: Ala Abu Ghosh; producer: Mohamed Habib Attia, Peter van Vogelpoel, Rashid Masharawi; production: CineTeleFilms, Sweetwater Pictures;

Country: Palestine, Tunisia, Netherlands

Year: 2008

Running time: 72

Colour: Colour

Format: HD CAM (HDTV)

In Rashid Masharawi's film, a former judge is reduced to driving a cab to support his family. It eschews the usual clichés about daily difficulties in the West Bank, maintaining its focus on the protagonist, portrayed by Mohamed Bakri, whose ridged face registers a constipated response to the surrealism of the quotidian in Ramallah. Like Palestine itself, he tries to maintain a modicum of dignity. Violence is off-screen, merely suggested or heard. The exhausted imagery of checkpoints and groups of occupying Israeli soldiers is absent. The director is more interested in depicting the beauty of this city, and in positing that the man's family - comprised of his wife and beloved nine-year-old daughter, whose birthday coincides with the day in which all of the action occurs - is instrumental in helping him to remember his own, and his tattered country's, intrinsic worth. (H. F.)