The Athena will be showing a transcultural film that deals with the difficulties of cultural life between countries. The film “The Syrian Bride” follows an Israeli woman who risks excommunication from her family by traveling to Syria to marry a man she has never met in person.
Many people in the United States don’t have to worry about being excommunicated from their family for marrying someone. However, in some parts of the world, this is a very real possibility.
The first installment in the Transcultural Encounters and Border Crossing film series, The Syrian Bride, gives a look into this difference in cultures. It will be screened at the Athena Cinema on Saturday.
Katarzyna Marciniak, English professor and curator for the series, helped bring the series to life with the help of Michael Gillespie. The film series aims to address all things relevant to border politics, including refugeeism, asylum seeking, and the war on terror. Alexandra Kamody, managing director of the Athena and Lorraine Wochna, the subject librarian for the School of Film, Theatre, Department of English and African American Studies also contributed to the effort.
“National borders are figured in these kinds of films as both violent geopolitical constructs and abstractions related to ideas of difference, otherness (and) travel,” Marciniak said in an email.
The Syrian Bride is focused on a girl named Mona, travelling from Israel to Syria to marry a man she has never met in person. She does this while knowing full well she will never again be able to return home to her family. The Athena website describes the film as, “a story about physical, mental, and emotional borders and the strength to cross them.”
The film aims to explore cross-cultural encounters and the complexities that come from them. Emotional complexities of inclusion, or lack thereof, in different cultures are also introduced to the viewer.
The other two films in the series, Dirt and Children in No Man’s Land, explore similar themes. Dirt follows an El Salvadorian woman who immigrates to America and works in luxury apartments in Manhattan, while Children in No Man’s Land revolves around a group of minors who cross the Mexican-American border to search for their parents in the United States.
“(I) wanted the students, faculty, and community members to contemplate the violent nature of borders, the precarious conditions endured by migrants, 'our' dependence on their labor, and ‘our’ complicity in the exploitation of their work,” Marciniak said.
There will also be a second installment to the series, featuring three more films.
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