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This is My Picture When I Was Dead
Mahmoud Al Massad (Netherlands, International Spectrum)
Friday, April 29, 6:30 p.m.
Cumberland 2 (159 Cumberland Street)
Sunday, May 1, 4:15 p.m.
Cumberland 2 (159 Cumberland Street)
This is My Picture When I Was Dead doesn’t feel like a documentary, and it isn’t trying to. An unstructured, meandering profile of Bashir Mraish, the son of an assassinated Palestine Liberation Organization leader, the film conveys his feeling of dislocation by creating it in its viewers as well.
Mraish was four when his father was killed by the Mossad, and as an adult he tries to piece together an understanding of his father’s life through photos, old news clippings, and especially the stories shared by his friends. Mahmoud Al Massad understands that the first rule of story-telling—especially when your subject carries historical and symbolic weight—is specificity, and lets Mraish’s search unfold in all its particulars and idiosyncrasies, without forcing it into some pat political narrative. It’s a window into larger struggles faced by many Palestinians—violent trauma, fissures in family, and sense of place—but Mraish remains entirely his own man.
This is My Picture suffers from its own structural experiments, which feel more like clever afterthoughts than necessary to the story, and from a pace so slow that the film sometimes sinks under its own pensiveness. We never get a fully rounded sense of Mraish, who speaks less than just about everyone around him—but then again, that’s what Mraish is looking for, too.
