Abstract

This article examines the role of the wedding in three Palestinian movies, Wedding in Galilee, Rana's Wedding, and Paradise Now. It describes how filmmakers Michel Khleifi and Hany Abu-Assad harness the power of the wedding to construct Palestinian selves (and especially gendered selves): communal, ethnic, and national identities; and as a site for control and resistance. I demonstrate how, by exploring the intersection between public and private domains that is crucial to the power of the wedding ritual itself, these filmmakers both depict the dialogic relationship between culture and politics in the stories they tell and enact that dialogism through their storytelling.

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