Farha - Tragic Inversion
Thoughts On: Farah (فرحة , 2021)
A young girls' dreams of education are shattered by the threat of genocide.
Farha is a poignant coming-of-age tale condensed to horrifying elemental parts. It contrasts the more common vision of a coming-of-age narrative - a young girl adamant on pursuing self-direction despite cultural pressures - with a violent inversion that, with an intentional absence of meaning and conclusion, provides her with her wish - to leave home - but at the consequence of its destruction. The inhumanity overseeing her arc toward maturity therefore bears absurd antithesis; we see her initially reject her culturally appointed place in her home, her role as a wife and mother and her imposition of silence only for her to choose not to flee from her home, striving in the process to adopt a child, reducing her being to whispers. Alas, each of these reversals is met with destruction and catastrophe; her home, family and chance at protecting a child obliterated before her eyes despite her invisibility. It is within this hell that she is impelled into maturity with tragic hopelessness. And such comes to be Sallam's primary comment on Al-Nakba; at the heart of the massacre is the destruction of humanity in its developmental form, its inhumanity an inversion of what it is to become a moral agent of free-will. Such is captured in the antipode of this coming-of-age tale that twists and deforms the basic story structure of adolescent growth, inflicting, not granting, adulthood and reality upon a child and her eyes.
Beautifully shot and acted with bold thematic focus and moments of incredible suspense, Farah can only be questioned briefly in its verisimilitude. Though based on a true story, there is a minor lapse of realism which I believe presents a missed opportunity to create suspense. In a key scene in which a gun is used by our titular character, she should have been deafened and even minorly injured by the kickback. Capturing this in the scene would have made it far more realistic and tense, but this is avoided. Nonetheless, Farha is a powerful composition quite brilliantly executed in terms of cinematography and performance in particular. Much recommended.
