When I saw The Visitor last year I was taken by the whole film but I was particularly moved by the woman who played Mouna who I thought I had never seen before. Her name is Hiam Abbass and I had seen her before in Munich but I really didn’t recognize her. Just a little background on Abbass, she’s Palestinian and lives in France and has been in a ton of foreign films.
Since seeing The Visitor (I still believe she should have been nominated for best supporting actress) Hiam made it to my list of actresses I will see in anything she is in.
Last week I was lucky enough to see her play two very different Palestinian women in The Lemon Tree and Amreeka.
Lemon Tree
She stars and carries the film The Lemon Tree about a Palestinian widow Salma, whose lemon grove becomes a sore point in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue.
What I love about Abbass is how much she can express without any movement. You see her in the grove watching the arrival (across a fence) of the huge entourage of her new neighbor the Israeli Defense Minister. She watches them (without asking) erect a lookout post in her grove. It doesn’t matter that it’s her land and has been in her family for 50 years. Then they build a fence around the grive so she can’t even get in to tend to it. But when she gets a letter saying that the grove will be demolished she has had enough and decides to fight back. She gets a lawyer and takes the fight all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. The film by Israeli Eran Riklis opens in NY on April 17 (longer review to come.)
Abbass is also in the Amreeka which opened the New Directors/ New Films festival last week in NY. Her character, Raghda Halaby is a Palestinian immigrant living in the midwest at the start of the 2nd Gulf war. The story is mainly about her sister Muna and her son and how they adjust to life in America in a time of war, and also how the whole family deals with the racism and narrow mindedness. As Raghda, Abbass shows a woman torn between two countries. Her kids are all American yet she tries to give them as much of her home as she can because she desperately misses her country. Raghda is full of anger and life and she is so much more and vibrant than Salma is. Amreeka is written and directed by Cherien Dabis and the good news is that it will be released theatrically this fall by National Geographic.
It’s not very often you get to see a woman play two very different characters from the same country on successive days. The fact that they are both Palestinian women makes it ever the more interesting since we see so few examples of people’s lives from the territories aside from news footage. Both films really made me think. While there were many great performances in both films, Hiam Abbass again blew me away with her talent. She is as good as any actress working today.
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Many thanks for this info. I too thought she was stunning in The Visitor and will look out for these films.
I completely agree, Melissa!
Hiam is fabulous & if I ruled the world, yes, she would have received a BSA nom for THE VISITOR. Here’s link to an interview I did when she was here for the Chgo International Film Festival:
http://www.films42.com/chats/Hiam_Abbass.asp
LEMON TREE opens here in May & I’m telling everyone to see it!
Enjoy :-)
Jan
She was also in Pomegranates and Myrrh at Sundance.
I totally agree with your write up. She is such a gem to watch, but her movies are hard to get. I ordered Lemon Tree, Satin Rouge, and Loving Father off of ebay. I hope to see her one day with an Oscar in her hand; she deserved on for Lemon Tree…. not Sanda Bullock.
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