The Syrian Bride,

If I were getting a Ph.D in international communications, films or women’s studies, I would want to do my thesis on marriage in movies. There are many, not just the American like Father of the Bride, but ethnic ones like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And each culture has them such as Monsoon Marriage, which I saw with my Indian neighbours who pointed out cultural things, that I would have missed.

I have added a new one, The Syrian Bride and like the Indian film, my Syrian friend pointed out things I would have seen but not fully understood. The film was made by Israelis and was the story of a woman in the Golan Heights marrying a distance cousin and moving with him to Damascus. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0423310/ to read about it or to see the trailer

My friend said that she knew many Damascian women who did the reverse. What made the movie so painful, was that as soon as the woman crossed the border to her new husband’s country, she could never return to her own people. They might wave across the border from barbed wire to barbed wire, but that was it.

She also told me that in the Golan Heights people loved Assad not like in Syria where he was feared and hated, something I would have missed as much as I would have missed why the mother snuck her cigarettes in Monsoon Marriage.

The family dynamics of living in an occupied land, parents saying goodbye forever to a much-loved daughter combined with difficulties of getting the bride’s passport cleared on both sides was a contrast to the normal happy marriage movies. In one scene, a border guard brings the bride, dressed in a white gown, veil and gloves, a chair to sit on. The day is hot and she accepts it. She is alone staring through a gate and across a stretch of land looking at her new husband to be. She can not go home. Her passport, which reads nationality unidentified, as do all her families’ has been released to the Syrians. She cannot get it back. She can not go forward. I won’t tell you how it ends. Find the film.

“Do many people have a passport stamped, nationality unidentified?” I asked my friend. Until that moment, I had never heard of such a thing. In my quest for nationality, I had never thought of what happened to people when their nations cease to exist or they are trapped by occupiers.

“Yes,” she said.

We talked long into the night instead of going to bed early as planned because I was jet lagged and because she had to go to the hospital where she is a resident the next morning. She has educated me to the results of governmental policies of centuries not in broad terms that would be taught in economic or military history courses, but on the results of those policies, that could leave a woman in a wedding gown, sitting in a chair caught between two countries.