Rent Thirst (2004)

Thirsty For Explanations. - Thirst review by NC

It's as if Tawfik Abu Wael has seen all those great films coming out of the Middle East; decided to make one himself - and failed. He's taken the 'less is more' rule to the extreme of leaving out swathes of information, so there are great chunks of 'Atash' which just make no sense. Why has Abu Shukri become the devil of a patriarch? Why does he call what looks like an abandoned military outpost 'my land'? (Unless he's referring to Palestine itself as 'our land' - but that's sheer guesswork as little else in the film broaches the Arab/Israeli situation.) How the heck has he managed to get away with his illicit charcoal business for TEN YEARS - illegally felling trees, fires which can be seen for miles around, the selling of the charcoal - to whom? Sometime in the past there has apparently been an assault of some kind on his eldest daughter (how seriously we are not told), and the gossip and the shame is the reason for him driving his family to such a deathly place. There are infuriating hints that the father himself is guilty of something he should be ashamed of, but again this is guesswork. There are so many more incidents which left me nonplussed that in the end I gave up trying. I started looking at the clock a good half-hour before it finished.

Abu Shukri clearly hasn't an atom of decency in him, so when sympathy for the main protagonist goes out of the window then the viewer has to fall back on the secondary characters. These are presented as cowering figures with no individuality, so when the ridiculous ending arrives, when one of them is supposed to have transformed overnight, it doesn't even begin to work. A pretty awful effort.