Tan DingXiang
RATING: NC16 (Violence and sexual scenes)
RUNTIME: 112 mins
STARRING: Freida Pinto, Hiam Abbass, Willem Dafoe, Vanessa Redgrave
Synopsis
From Julian Schnabel, director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, comes Miral, the story of three generations of women whose lives intertwine in the starkly human search for justice, hope and reconciliation amid a world overshadowed by conflict, rage and war.
The story begins in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948. On her way to work, Hind Husseini (HIAM ABBASS, The Visitor, Amreeka) comes across 55 orphan children wandering in the street. Unwilling to walk away, she takes them home to give them food and shelter.
Within six months, those 55 have grown to almost 2000, and Hind transforms her family’s house into the Dar Al- Tifl Al-Arabi Institute, which will in turn, through Hind’s passionate devotion, become a school providing education to orphans and a beacon of hope to girls set adrift by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thirty years after Hind’s catalytic act of compassion, in 1978, a 7 year-old girl arrives at theInstitute in the wake of her mother’s heartbreaking death. This is Miral (FREIDA PINTO,Slumdog Millionaire), who will grow up sheltered inside the Institute’s protective walls, naïveto the troubles roiling to a fever pitch outside them.
Then, at the age of 17, on the cusp of the Intifada resistance, Miral is assigned to teach at a refugee camp where she is awakened to theanger, frustration and struggle that seems to be her legacy.
When she falls for a fervent political activist, Hani (OMAR METWALLY, Munich, Rendition), she finds herself in a personal battle that mirrors the greater dilemma around her: to fight like those before her or follow Mama Hind’s defiant belief that education will pave a road to peace.