An Arabic tale that takes place in Scandinavia. About ancient religious hatred, about love, punishment, guilt and redemption, about being responsible for one's own actions and refusing a path of violence. Jamil stands in the middle. He is fighting the war of his life; a war within himself.
Review:
A blood feud of Shakespearean proportions brutally plays out within Copenhagen's Arab community in Omar Shargawi's gritty "Go With Peace Jamil." Using tight shots exuding an air of oppression, Shargawi, also co-scripter and thesp, details Sunni/Shiite animosity in an often overly didactic way, pushing information already made abundantly clear, but this tense thriller remains involving as a marked man desperately seeks to escape the ramifications of his own crime. Impressively repping an immigrant group rarely encountered by the host population, this high-octane drama bagged a Tiger award at Rotterdam and could find takers on Euro screens.
An overwhelming aura of machismo -- sweating bodies, large biceps, men hanging in packs -- grips Copenhagen's Arab oasis, where Jamil (Dar Salim) has just revenged the murder of his mother years before. Knowing that his victim's brother, Shiite kingpin Mahmoud (Khalid Al-Subeihi), will now continue the vendetta, Jamil sets out to protect his family before escaping the country.
Dropping his young son Adam (Elias al-Subehi) off with his wise and gentle father (Munir Shargawi, the helmer's real father), Jamil makes contact with best friend Omar (the director himself), who takes a bullet for his pal, setting off a further blood feud.
As pressure mounts, Jamil's father tries to get him to end the circle of violence, but it seems nearly impossible to set aside a hatred fostered by generations of tit-for-tat killings.
While Jamil unsuccessfully tries to convince ex-wife Yasmina (Amira Helene Larsen, making the most out of a small role) to go away with him, his father suffers a heart attack and Mahmoud's henchman Salah (Salah el Koussa) steps in to kidnap the child. Any thoughts of stopping the bloodshed come to a screeching halt.
With his first feature, Shargawi expertly creates an atmosphere of tension leavened by affections all too often set aside. Rhythm is a stand-out, as the editors (three are credited in a rare benign case of not too many cooks) ratchet up the sense of destructive paranoia, calibrating it all so that the final brutality still packs a punch, no matter how predictable it may seem.
Too bad the script feels the need to constantly spell out the internecine Sunni-Shiite conflict, already abundantly clear from the first explanation. The oxymoronic nature of the term "honor killing" is especially delineated by Jamil's father in a nice scene where he goads his son into a philosophical and theological debate on sin.
Brief scenes with Yasmina, reluctantly working as a belly dancer, hint at the particular problems the women in the community face as they try to negotiate both the Arab world they come from and the Danish city they've made their home.
Shargawi extracts the most from a cast of largely unknown actors, proving himself an equally accomplished thesp. Real stand-out, however, is the lensing; pic was shot on 16mm and blown up to reveal a rough, saturated texture that expands upon the sense of a closed community on the brink of explosion. Handheld camerawork is modulated to appropriately fit the action.
Screenshots:
Código: Seleccionar todo
File Name .............: Go with Peace Jamil.avi
File Size (in bytes) ..: 1,160,730,624 bytes
Runtime (# of frames) .: 01:25:59 ( frames)
Video Codec ...........: XviD
Frame Size ............: 720x304 [=2.368]
FPS ...................: 25.000
Video Bitrate .........: 1345 kb/s
Bits per Pixel ........: 0.246 bpp
B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC ......: [B-VOP]...[]...[]...[]
Audio Codec ...........: 0x2000(AC3, Dolby Laboratories, Inc) AC3
Sample Rate ...........: 48000 Hz
Audio bitrate .........: 448 kb/s [5 channel(s)] CBR audio
Interleave ............: 40 ms
No. of audio streams ..: 1
Go with Peace Jamil.avi 
Go with Peace Jamil.srt English soft subs.
I heard lots of good things about this movie after it won Best Direction at the Romanian TIFF festival, so I was really excited to see it. Thanks to area8001 @ Cinematik for posting the DVD :cheers:
