Road movies can range from popcorn entertainment to Michelangelo Antonioni. The genre is generous, which allows Dima El-Horr to invest her excursion with political nuance, existential heft and a specifically female point of view.
The film opens with an arresting sequence: a couple runs through a tunnel, backlit brightly. She calls out to him, but he keeps running. The police lead him away to prison. In the same tunnel, this one lover is now joined by dozens of other women, all carrying portraits of their imprisoned men.
From this brisk, symbolic opening, Every Day Is a Holiday begins a road trip from Beirut into the desert, toward Lebanon's men's prison. It starts on a bus, but soon events throw the women out into a landscape of parched rock, land mines and hot sun, where their common cause begins to conflict with competing decisions.
Anyone who knows Elia Suleiman's films about Palestine will recognize how El-Horr distills the harsh social realities of life amid war into stark, sometimes absurd scenes. Examining the artificial community created by three women whose men all happen to be prisoners, she explores tensions of class and politics in beautifully conceived set pieces. She also benefits from a cast that includes the superb Hiam Abbass.
El-Horr's short film The Street also followed the quest for an absent love object – in that case, a young boy's bicycle. The Street so impressed Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul that he sought her out for an interview. Though the two filmmakers are different in many ways, they share the ability to wrest images of their nations from the limits of realism and sympathy. A sophisticated filmmaker who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, El-Horr is a major new voice in the cinema of the Middle East. Every Day Is a Holiday is a striking debut with a strong perspective, smart formal choices and real heart.
Cameron Bailey
Dima El-Horr was born in Lebanon and earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently teaches cinema at the Lebanese American University in Lebanon. She has worked as a projectionist, editor and director in both theatre and television. Her short films include the documentaries
Echo of a Prayer (92) and
Beaux Arts à Beirut (95) and the short fiction films
Lost Identity (94),
The Street (97) and
Prêt-à-porter, Imm Ali (03).
Every Day Is a Holiday (09) is her feature-directing debut.