Review: Farha

Farha is a 90-minute film set somewhere in Palestine in 1948, just as the state of Israel is being set up and the British mandate forces are withdrawing (we see them briefly, as children throw stones and shout “get out” and in English “goodbye” at them). It follows a teenage girl, the title character (played brilliantly by Karam Taher, a non-actor), who in the first half is trying to get her father to agree to send her to school in the unnamed city. Midway through the film, her life is interrupted by the coming of war and she spends most of the second half in hiding. She sees Israeli troops massacre a local family and leave a baby to die. Ultimately, she breaks out and leaves the village.

The first half is a snapshot of Palestinian village life just before the 1948 war. Farha is in her teens and is approaching the age where a girl would normally get married; some of her friends are already doing so. We see her in a circle around an older male teacher learning to recite the Qur’an; he ends the lesson early because one of the girls is getting married. Farha is seen swinging on a rope swing with a younger female friend and talking about marriage; she is clear she does not want to get married yet, but wants to enrol in a school and there is only limited time. Meanwhile, her father is entertaining a proposal for Farha from her cousin, Nasser. Her uncle, who appears more modern (a much shorter beard, for example) is encouraging him to allow Farha to go to school ad promises to look after her like his own daughter; the Qur’an teacher tells him not to let her go to the city given the volatile situation, and suggested that girls don’t need to learn more than the Qur’an. Farha sees this conversation and interrupts them. Ultimately her father agrees to her wishes, but just as she is talking about it with the younger friend, she hears a bomb going off and runs home.

There, she finds that people are getting ready to flee as all but one entrance to the village has been taken by Israeli forces. She is told to leave with her uncle as her father has to stay and fight, but she jumps out of the car and runs back to her father. Her father shuts her in the pantry and tells her he will come back to get her. This is about halfway through the film and most of the rest is set in the pantry as she tries to survive shut in a dark room while fighting is going on nearby. At one point a man and a woman appear near the door and the woman is screaming, in labour it turns out; she gives birth to a boy. Farha shouts to get their attention, but they do not hear her. She hears messages over a loudhailer telling remaining Palestinians to leave or they will be killed in their houses. The couple and their children are apprehended by a group of Jews who argue as to whether they are fighters or not and whether they should be killed or not. A man in a mask, who talks in English (we are not told the reason for the mask or where he has come from) argues that they had said they would not kill villagers, only fighters. Ultimately the soldiers murder the couple and their two older children with a machine gun, but a soldier is told not to “waste a bullet” on the baby, so he leaves him crying on the ground.

After this, Farha attempts to break out of the pantry and when throwing heavy objects at the door fail to break it open, she finds her father’s gun in a food sack and shoots at it, and this eventually succeeds. She takes a wash in a nearby well, sits on the swing briefly, then walks off. The message on the screen tells us she never saw her father again and that it is believed he was killed in the fighting; Farha, real name Radiyyah, made it to Syria.

The film is the subject of a campaign by pro-Israel lobbying groups to censor it; its followers have been called on to rate it down on Netflix itself and on film sites such as IMDB. I think the film is a rather tame portrayal of the Nakba. The first half of the film is about the pressures and conflicts of Palestinian village life at a time when there were people seeking to modernise disagreeing with people who wanted to keep things as they were, someone getting married, people celebrating, young people learning. People are talking about the war, but they don’t seem to expect it to hit them so quickly. We see Israeli soldiers only towards the end, and they kill a family of unarmed civilians including two children. That happened during the Nakba. It doesn’t go to excess in portraying them as bloodthirsty, nor rely on any antisemitic stereotypes. It shows one of them disagreeing with it. It’s pretty balanced, while remaining in the realm of fact, which is that the Israeli army carried out atrocities, including massacres, against Palestinian civilians while setting up their state.

I read a ridiculous petition to Netflix to pull this film; it claims that Farha’s hiding out echoes the story of Anne Frank, who hid with her family (not alone) until she was betrayed by a neighbour to the Nazis, who sent her to Auschwitz, then Belsen, where she died; Farha survives the war. It also accuses the film of a “blood libel”, a comparison with an old antisemitic myth that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzos for Passover. There is no hint of that here. Any time an Israeli soldier or settler is shown killing someone (even in real footage shot in the West Bank), people who share it are accused of using the blood libel. It’s nonsense. These are soldiers who kill civilians because they regard them as less than human, as soldiers often do when enemy civilians fall into their hands.

Besides being a fairly realistic portrayal of the Palestinian experience of the Nakba, it’s also a story of a resourceful young girl with her life ahead of her and her own ideas of what she wants to do with it, trying to survive in a difficult and frightening situation. Despite previously wanting to leave the village to go to school, she refuses to leave her father when the village is invaded, perhaps because of loyalty and perhaps because she appreciates his decision to let her go to school. It doesn’t go to extremes in portraying her experience, either. Nobody is shown being raped in this film (a quite common trope in recent films) and despite the trauma of watching the family being murdered, she comes to no personal harm. The film is rated 15 in the UK and I think that’s a reasonable rating; I wouldn’t show this to children but would watch it with older teenagers. I have seen people suggesting it might be triggering for Palestinians and this might well be true of anyone else who’s lived through war, but some of them will have seen much worse than what is shown here.

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