The crisis of a 40 year-old Arab man

By Lupita Peimbert

(Film) The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival brings a TV series from the Arab world, filled with creativity, innovative perspectives, and wit.

“The Writer,” appears to be telling the day-to-day vicissitudes of being a successful TV writer, father of three, husband, and a Palestinian living in Jerusalem –one who married a Jewish woman.

What this TV series is really talking about is rather a universal story: the predicaments, confusion, and perhaps unfinished business of a 40 year-old man who has a midlife crisis –and because he is writer, he gets to explore his crisis by projecting his difficulties into a fictional story, letting life unfold both, on a television monitor and on his life.

When you add cultural contexts such as the expectations about men and women in the Arab world and what life is supposed to be about –and so on, the result is an exquisite story worth to be told everywhere else. Just change the Arab-world context to whatever other idiosyncrasies and you may feel immediately identified. Also Add to the picture a new woman and certain matters of the heart, and well…let’s see what happens.

Sayed Kashua is the author of this work, based on his life. He also wrote “Arab Labor,” a highly successful series. The writer is played by actor Yousef Sweid. The series has 10 episodes, and it aired on Israeli TV in October 2015. Attendants at the screenings by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival get to see three very entertaining episodes, in Hebrew with English subtitles.

Enough said. Go see it. You won’t be disappointed.