Let It Be Morning is a 2021 Palestinian drama film directed by Eran Kolirin. It is based on the Hebrew-language novel of the same name by Palestinian novelist Sayed Kashua. Let It Be Morning. The movie was chosen to compete in the Un Certain Regard category at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival in June. However, the movie’s Palestinian cast objected to being labelled as “Israeli” and withdrew from the Cannes Film Festival in displeasure. It was chosen as Israel’s entry for the 94th Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film category.
A calm movie called “Let It Be Morning” has a potent conclusion. It arrives at its destination through a continuous accumulation of routine information. You could even claim that the entire purpose of writer/director Erin Kolorin’s latest film is to demonstrate how people can still go about their daily lives even in the midst of heated political crises where violence could break out at any moment.
Kolorin, a Jewish Israeli director well known for the global smash “The Band’s Visit” from 2007, ventures outside of his comfort zone. He has adapted a book by Israeli-born Palestinian author Sayed Kashua about a family of Palestinian citizens. In the days following a wedding, the primary story takes place in a tiny community.
Members of the wedding party who are travelling from other cities (mostly Jerusalem) must turn around from the checkpoint, go back to the village, and wait until Israeli military personnel block the only way out of town. The theme of captivity, both physically and emotionally, dominates a large portion of the movie. This is established in the opening scene of “Let It Be Morning,” a tracking shot that appears to float through the wedding celebration while the viewer peers between flimsy vertical bars.
It initially looks as though we could be gazing through a helmet’s protective grille, but in reality, it’s from the perspective of caged doves that are finally meant to fly away to celebrate the couple’s nuptials.
Lina (Yara Elham Jarrar), the bride, and Aziz (Samir Bishirat), the groom, are carried around the dance floor by revellers while being lifted over their heads. Samir (Alex Bakri), Aziz’s older, sad-seeming brother, is introduced to us. Samir is from Jerusalem, where he works as a comfortable tech executive, has a wife and little son who have travelled with him, and a mistress who he surreptitiously emails. Although Samir’s wife Mira (Juna Suleiman) is upset that he no longer touches her, she ignores her gut feelings about what it might imply.
The older brother Samir, a well-mannered, well-dressed man who utilises silence to conceal his unease about going home and being who he is, serves as the main character for the most of the narrative. (I’m not a good person. I admit that afterwards.) Through Samir, the movie shows how the political and personal aspects of the narrative are intertwined and related.
Not only is the Israeli occupation of the territories a sensitive subject worldwide, but the novel also explores class tensions within the Israeli Arab community, making it difficult for its members to agree on whether to take up arms or keep their heads down. Before this movie was released, Kolorin told journalists that he anticipated getting into trouble for being an Israeli Jewish artist with the chutzpah to make a film about an Israeli Arab family.
The second strategy has different names among radicals, such as cowardice and collaboration. Both are employed in this movie’s heated scenes, which carefully depicts how some residents of the town, particularly Samir’s extended family, who are firmly upper-middle class, are concerned that using a confrontational approach will cause them to lose all of their material gains (or worse—as we see when a family friend in the crowd gathered at the checkpoint loses his cool, jumps in his car, and drives at the soldiers).
The film succeeds better as a character study than a polemic, and that is ultimately where it seems to be headed. There may be too many considerations of confinement as a political and psychological condition, and it probably leans too much on the doves that appear more at ease in cages than in flight (the images put across these notions better on their own).
These are nitpicks, though. Particularly in Samir’s encounters with Abed and Mira and Abed’s exchanges with the mobster Nashraf, the characters are flawlessly performed and written. Additionally, Kolorin is adept at knowing how long to keep a shot or scene in focus. He only provides us with the information required to make a point before moving on to the next. You don’t fully appreciate how much material he crammed into a small narrative area until you watch the movie again. One of those films that sticks in the mind and strives to be subtle, which is no easy task given the subject matter.