ALI IMRAN, Special to The Denisonian—
10 Days Before the Wedding is incredibly joyous and eerily comedic. You only need to hear Amr Gamal speak to understand why the movie itself is such an impressive feat. While Gamal paints an astounding picture of artistic commitment and courage that went into the making of the film, the movie itself is hauntingly evocative and relatable.
It is unique in its depiction of contemporary Yemeni life as it navigates two lovers in a world that is bent on keeping them apart through family, war, debt, or patriarchal poppycock.
With its many song interludes and portrayal of Rasha and Ma’amoon’s relationship as they wander the bazaars and streets of Yemen, some scenes almost feel like a homage to the Bollywood romance of 2000s. Amr also confirms my suspicion, proclaiming his admiration for Bollywood and A. R. Rehman.
10 Days Beyond the Wedding does call into question what we might expect of a romantic comedy. For one, it brings you on the brink of tears through its sheer portrayal of Aden. Speaking of Aden’s people reacting to the film, Gamal remembers that people in their 50s and 60s were crying because they saw in the film and its screening the Yemen before the 1990s. While younger audiences related to the constant precarity that marks the lives of the characters.
“For me Aden is everything,” says Gamal, talking via Zoom from Aden, with the Fajr adhan in his background. And indeed for two hours of 10 Days Before the Wedding, the city itself is very much a protagonist and utterly stunning. Gamal says that he and his team intentionally wrote a script to show and document Aden’s historical monuments that were destroyed in the war. While calling his fiance Rasha, as both find themselves in crises, Ma’amoon is captured in the middle of a public square. While their love and commitment to each other drives the narrative of the film, what heightens the affective impact is the bullet hole ridden tiles that are behind him. War as a lived reality is neither specatularized nor underplayed.
Violence and material scarcity in the film is necessarily distracting. As Gamal also highlighted, the film exposes the false “narrative of reconstruction” that the parties complicit in the destruction of Aden’s streets have built. US, Saudi Arabia, and other allied invaders in a conflict-ridden Yemen promise reconstruction. They justify the destruction of the material and social culture of Aden by promising a future. Yet this is hardly the case. For Gamal, it is also the material impacts and remnants of war that are necessary to preserve and document. He calls the newer concrete buildings being built on the ruins of old buildings “ugly.”
The camera in 10 Days Before The Wedding, moving between houses, desolated and bombed structures, and streets, capatures so much and at little expense of the dramatic or comedic elements. Gamal says he wants students to pay attention to this subtext. 10 Days Before the Wedding is antithetical to ignorance and it very much makes viewers aware of that.