A WEDDING IN RAMALLAH International Documentary Competition

“I cannot take another broken heart again, you know?” says Bassam Abed on the eve of his second wedding.

After a painful divorce from an American woman, Bassam returns to his native Palestine, seeking a traditional wife willing to fetch his slippers and do his laundry. The first woman who accepts his. offer is Mariam, a gangly, stoop-shouldered spinster. Within a month, the two are married. Director Sherine Salama intended A WEDDING IN RAMALLAH to focus only on the pageantry of Middle Eastern tials. After the ceremony, however, when the.Camp David peace talks broke down, Bassam returned to the States, leaving his new bride adrift in a sea of gossipy in-laws and very few memories. Deciding to keep her camera rolling, Salama records Mariam’s struggle to join her husband in America.

The resulting documentary is an engrossing multi-act drama of visas, gunfire and crushed expectations, climaxing in the inescapable ennui of Cleveland, Ohio.