‘Farha’ Film Review: A Simple Affecting Movie About Civilian War Casualties

Farha, Jordan’s official entry to the Academy Awards, centers its story on the effects of war on a teenage girl and conveys the brutality of violence through a barebones narrative.

Darin J. Sallam’s film begins with the sun setting on Britain’s Mandate for Palestine and progresses to the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It tells this story over a few days in the life of Farha (Karam Taher), a 14-year-old girl who dreams of leaving her small Palestinian village and attending formal school in the city.

The timeline that the film follows is part of what Palestinians refer to as the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe). The 1948 war forced “over half of the Palestinian Arab population” to flee or be expelled, according to the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on November 30, 2022, directing the Division for Palestinian Rights to devote its “activities in 2023 to the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba.”

Farha’s fiery determination, a driving force that even convinces her father to let her go to the city, is abruptly halted when the conflict reaches her village. This is the film’s foundation — that the first casualties of war are not the politicians who perpetuate it, but the civilians who are thrust with an unnatural ending.

Farha (Arabic)

Director: Darin J. Sallam

Cast: Karam Taher, Ashraf Barhom, Ali Suliman, Tala Gammoh, and others.

Duration: 92 minutes

Storyline: As the violence of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war reaches the doors of a small Palestinian village, a teenage girl is exposed to the brutalities of war as she struggles to survive.

Sallam expertly employs the creative tool in her first feature-length film to hammer home the aberration that war poses to normal life. The cinematography and set design seamlessly transition from fairytale-like shots of Farha and her friends relaxing at a small waterfall, and of Farha’s village in vivid colors during a marriage scene, to streets shrouded in the dust as the conflict begins, and finally to tightly composed images of Farha hiding in the dark as she finds herself surrounded by violence.

This descent into chaos is also marked by a sudden change: Farha and her friend Farida are discussing Farha’s dream of studying in a city being realized and what their prospects would be with formal education when the sound of a blast in the village signals the start of the conflict. It emphasizes once more how civilian lives are left indefinitely in limbo.

Farha is locked in a food storeroom by her father for her safety for the majority of the 92-minute film. Farha’s life for the next few days is thrown into darkness because she can only see what is going on outside through a tiny hole in the wall. The war outside her hiding place is primarily represented by the sounds she hears. The constant snap and crack of bullets and the ominous boom of bombs fill the storeroom, leaving Farha and the audience wondering how close the danger is.

Sallam has described the story as a “coming-of-age” story, which is successfully executed in the changes that Farha goes through as a silent witness to the atrocities. When the weapons finally quiet down and Farha finds a way out of hiding, she returns to the places she visited a few days ago, but both have changed — the fairytale village has turned to rubble, and Farah’s mind is heavy with the horrors she has witnessed.

Farah and Karam Taher’s evocative debut, Farah, shows war through the eyes of those whose voices do not make it to the negotiation table, its most burdened participants, through impactful and simple storytelling.