Cinema
Struggle in Jerash
صراع في جرش
Wasif al-Sheikh Yassin · 1957
Synopsis
A tourist travels through the sites of Jordan under the escort of a policeman, an old friend of her father's, while a gang of criminals lies in wait for her. The chase between the young woman and her protector on one side and the gang on the other leads to the Roman ruins of Jerash. The story is often interrupted for documentary views of Amman, Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Context
The crew made on site the equipment for developing, printing, editing and synchronising the sound, and shot the interiors at the Philadelphia Hotel in Amman. The title imitates that of an Egyptian film of 1954, and the actors, police officers included, mostly speak the Egyptian dialect. A trailer showed views of the cities of Jordan and Palestine, which have since become documents. Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan, who came from Jaffa after 1948, has said he was its author; the Darat al Funun screened it in Amman in 2009.
Who it is for
A film in Arabic, mostly in Egyptian dialect, with very limited distribution; to be watched as a document.
Prizes and reception
Historians see it as the birth certificate of Jordanian cinema; the Amman press judged it naive, more documentary than fictional.
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