LOS ANGELES – During the making of Miral, a coming-of-age tale about a teenaged Palestinian girl, a profound moment occurred for director Julian Schnabel as he was filming in a convent outside of Jerusalem. Sirens sounded and everyone on set – men, women, Palestinians, Israelis and otherwise – suddenly stopped for several minutes of silence.
“There was a pool of humanity at that moment that was in sync,” recalled Schnabel. “It was powerful.” He didn’t know it at the time, but Schnabel was experiencing an Israeli tradition that’s part of Yom HaShoah, a memorial day in remembrance of the millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust. While everyone on set remained mum for that moment of silence, other folks have been anything but quiet about his film in the months leading up to its release.
After the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival last year, some critics dubbed ‘Miral,’ which is based on the semi-autobiographical novel about four Palestinian women by journalist – and Schnabel’s girlfriend – Rula Jebreal, as pro-Palestinian propaganda. Others questioned the casting of Indian-born actress Freida Pinto of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ fame in the title role.
“The story remains a muddle of melodramatic gestures, extraneous protagonists and blunt political talking points,” a critic wrote after seeing the film at the festival. “Schnabel’s attempts to compensate stylistically with his trademark smeary impressionistic visuals feel like auteurist doodles in the margins of an important subject.”
Unlike most films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ‘Miral’ only focuses on Palestinians’ stories. The film begins in 1948 after the United Nations instituted the two-state system and chronicles the opening of the Dar Al-Tifel Institute in East Jerusalem, an orphanage for Palestinian children founded by Hind Husseini (played by Hiam Abbass).
‘Miral’ also touches on the backgrounds of would-be terrorist Fatima (Ruba Blal) and Miral’s mother, Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri), whose suicide compels Miral’s father (Alexander Siddig) to leave her at the school. The film then fast-forwards to 1988 as Hind sends the teenaged Miral (Pinto) outside the orphanage’s walls to teach at refugee camps.
After the film was screened, Schnabel trimmed ‘Miral,’ and distributor Weinstein Co. delayed it from a December to March release, moving it out of this year’s awards race. The biggest backlash came this month when Jewish groups, like the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, condemned the film’s premiere at the United Nations General Assembly.
The Weinstein Co. has been promoting “Miral,” which opens in limited release Friday, with a graphical print and online advertisement featuring a striking red-and-black image of Pinto, which Schnabel said he shot himself, accented with a barbed-wire Star of David surrounding her eye and a bold tagline declaring it’s “the movie they tried to stop.”
The Weinstein Co. has a long history of courting controversy with their films. The distributor battled the Motion Picture Association of America over the strict ratings of such movies as ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,’ ‘Blue Valentine’ and ‘The King’s Speech.’
