Summer Film Series: “Villa Touma” by Suha Arraf

Friday | 29 May | 6:30 p.m.
Director: Suha Arraf / 57 minutes / 2012 
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Leaving the Catholic orphanage in Jerusalem where she was raised, eighteen-year-old Badia arrives at the home of her spinster aunts in Ramallah. Crossing the threshold, she finds a house, and three lives, frozen in time. The sisters are the last remnants of the bourgeois Christian minority that stayed on in the city after the war. In their fifties and nearly destitute, they are ruled by the eldest’s strict domestic routines and their perception of themselves as classically educated, socially proper ladies of the upper crust. Now saddled with the orphaned daughter of their late brother, the sisters decide to marry Badia off to a man from a good family. But Badia’s spirited temperament rattles the tightly wound sisters, and soon secrets and historical grudges cascade through Villa Touma. | By Suha Arraf / 87 minutes / 2014
 
To read an interview with the director, Suha Arraf, click here