Will My Parents Come To See Me

Will My Parents Come To See Me is the titular question, but its circumstances hold within them other questions. "Are you ready? What would you like to eat today? Anything else?"

There are insides and there are outsides. In the cell, in the car, we see clearly. The doctor's white coat is as much a barrier as hijab, as bars with clutching hands. The questions come. "How are you doing? Are you afraid of needles?" The eyes reflected in the mirror are bound by its frame, that frame by the windscreens shade, that glass by the pillows of the car, that car by the street filled with others going about their days.

This fateful day. There is a process. A medical examination. A magistrate's examination. The procedure for tomorrow is explained as part of that procedure. It will take 20 minutes to get there, a little less than the length of the film. Prayer is permitted, when it had not been. The execution will take place by shooting. "You don't need to understand the rest". "Did you understand everything?"

Mo Harawe's film is stunning. Measured of pace, Steven Samy's camera finds the light where it falls, Mohamad Abinar Isse's sound hears the noises around the silence. The push of feet as the rows stand for the imam, the bustle of traffic on a day that is like any other days. The navigator steady in the background her shadow fit to the wall as part of the routine. The chatter of other conversations. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Tomorrow is also the day a "soul will be set free".

Farah is a cipher within the walls, beyond them. In his frame a prison, one worn more closely than the grey uniform. Unspeaking, silence sits like a blanket. The music might be diegetic, the phone, the band, the car stereo, but it will not remain so. Night falls and eventually silence comes. Today will become that tomorrow. A long night. We have been told that some have trouble sleeping but we will see and feel it.

Cristi Iorgi's sound is integral, the music of El Wali and Salim Sachd part of a sonic geography that holds us fast. Harawe has with his colleagues and his cast produced something that asks us about watching.

The fateful tread minded me of Stations Of The Cross, of other films elegiac and mournful. The watching mule minded me of Night Of The Kings, of other films that find magic in the tragedies of Africa's prisons. A transition of perspective, even protagonist minded me of R, a film whose subtleties and subtitle extend far beyond that single letter. Even the nature of observation reminded me of other things I have watched, how could it not, in particular the blurring of Never Look Away.

The bounce of the truck's bed towards the transfer of custody and its slow transition to silence minded me of any number of moments of adrenaline, of excitement, of fear. None of these remained watching the young man stand, in his blue grey like the sky upon the landscape. The desert red and the tan of the uniforms, the hills green and the brown of the uniforms, the clouds the shining white of the imam's robes.

Sound and, again, the absence of sound. Something wrenching, tearing. It doesn't matter what happened before, doesn't matter what will happen after. The course is set, the destination fixed. All that changes is the timing. There is an echo of the beginning near the end, and that circularity, that suggestion of a cycle, there is a bleakness that speaks not to a coldness but the loss of warmth. The sun might shine.