Paradise Now - 7

This is the first Palestinian film to be nominated for an Academy Award, which happened this year- it lost to Tsotsi. The film is in Arabic and is about two men who live in the occupied West Bank. Since they feel imprisoned in their own homes they volunteer to be martyrs in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Most of the film is taken up with the context and conversation surrounding this decision. A well made film that may have you asking, if I thought death was the only way to protest one's oppression, would I die for it? Is this courage? Or despair? The key to the film is remembering that you most likely are not in the same thought world, real world, or state of mind to even really comprehend a decision of this magnitude. But the question is made real in the storytelling of this film. And it may have changed the way you think, or at the very least made you reflect on questions of life and death.