I wrote a film review for Palestine in America (published here), and thought that if I do more reviews, I'll post them here too. Enjoy!

Written and directed by Mai Masri, 3000 Nights was screened on May 5th, the closing night of the 2016 Chicago Palestine Film Festival. The award-winning feature followed a short film called Detaining Dreams, which focused on the stories of Palestinian children and youth in Israeli prisons.   

3000 Nights is the story of a newlywed Palestinian schoolteacher, Layal (Maisa Abd Elhadi) who gets wrongfully accused of aiding a terrorist attack and is sentenced to eight years in an Israeli prison.  

The film opens on a dark, pouring night where we first see Layal. The film’s hauntingly beautiful and crisp cinematography shines through its immediate construction of the prison’s cruel atmosphere and the air of hostility between the inmates and the prison guards. Layal is in a nightgown, blindfolded, and barefoot when she is led out of a military van and into the Israeli prison she’ll stay in for several days before her trial. 

We see Masri highlight the various challenging aspects of being a Palestinian woman in an Israeli prison. We see the anti-Arab racism play out not only in how Israeli and Arab prisoners get treated by the prison guards, but also in how even between inmates, the Israeli prisoners treat their Arab counterparts with disgust and hate. 

Soon after she is imprisoned, Layal learns that she’s pregnant. Her condition is continuously exploited with false promises of freedom. She is asked to report on her friends if she wants to get out. She is told she can’t keep her baby and should get an abortion. Against all this pressure and hardship, Layal can’t rely even on her husband, who tells her to abort the baby and do whatever it takes to get out, even if it means giving false testimony. When she gets her sentence, her husband leaves Layal to go to Canada while half-heartedly assuring her that there he’ll build a life for them.      

Despite the blatant racism and brutality against Arabs and Palestinians, Masri doesn’t build caricatures of her characters on either side. She gives us complex people with believable storylines, such as Layal’s lawyer, Rachel (Laura Hawa), and Shulamit (Raida Adon), one of the Israeli prisoners. Masri captures the nuances of each character’s humanity and the circumstances they are living in when she constructs them. 

Masri’s portrayal of the mistrust and unease between the inmates is convincing to the audience. Layal is first placed in a cell with Israeli prisoners, but moved to an Arab cell when complications arise. This cell is made of a classic mismatch of characters, that are typical of these kind of prison movies with adopted family plot lines. We have a Lebanese revolutionary, Sanaa (Nadira Omran), two sisters, Jamilah (Rakeen Saad) and Fidaa (Hana Chamoun), an old grandmother (Haifa Al-Agha), and a friendly mother figure (Anahid Fayyad). 

Layal isn’t immediately trusted, especially by Sanaa, who is the main troublemaker in the prison, able to get news out and organize the prisoners. But over time they grow on each other, and we are given beautiful and emotional scenes of the women reading, joking, and singing together, and forming a huge family with the birth of Nour, Layal’s son. 

The film reaches its climax when the inmates learn of the 1982 massacre in Beirut. They decide to go on a strike, refusing to eat, leave their cells, sew military uniforms, or cook for the guards. Ruti (Izabel Ramadan), the prison’s director, separates Layal from her friends and threatens her – either Layal stops participating in the strike, or they’ll take Nour, who is two-years-old at the time. We see the difficulty of being a mother in prison and how Layal has to choose between the resistance and her son. Ruti resorts to extreme means to discourage the prisoners and subdue their efforts, but they manage to persevere and stay together. 

Masri builds a web of intricate storylines in 3000 Nights. We see unexpected friendships, inevitable betrayal, hard decisions, and a budding romance. She gives us beautiful montages of time passing whether it be in the dry and desolate shots of wire fences or the buildup of chalk drawings in a solitary cell. 

She gives us raw emotions and honesty, “A little humanity won’t hurt you,” Rachel tells Ruti, trying to convince her to let Layal’s mother help Layal during labor. Ruti retaliates by saying, “Don’t forget how you lost your son, Rachel.” It’s in these small interactions that Masri gives depth and particularity to her characters, and she does it masterfully.

The movie ends on a bittersweet note, one that I won’t spoil, but one that I can guarantee will leave the audience with hope alongside their sadness. Over 700,000 Palestinians are detained, we learn, and over 6,000 men, women, and children are in Israeli prisons, living under inhumane and unfair conditions. But there is a growing movement to expose these circumstances and make Israel accountable for its actions, and it’s gaining traction.  

For Chicago folks: Next fall, we'll be screening 3000 Nights at the University of Chicago, as part of a Palestinian film exhibition throughout the first quarter. So be on the lookout for that!