The Present

It's Yousef's (Saleh Bakri) wedding anniversary. His wife is despairing over a failing fridge, so he decides to splash out and buy her a new one. This ought to be a simple enough task, but they live in Palestine, so to reach the shop he has to pass through an Israeli checkpoint. It's a thoroughly dehumanising process which at one point involves him being locked in a cage, but it's only the beginning of the challenges he will face.

Much of Farah Nabulsi's powerful film is seen through the eyes of Yousef's small daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj, an amazing find), who is accompanying him and learning how the checkpoints work. This includes having to learn that she should not try to stand up for her father, nor he for himself, no matter how much the Israeli soldiers seem to be bullying him. Staying as calm as he can and using gentle humour to signal to her that everything's alright, he accepts his own powerlessness even as he pleads with the soldiers not to separate him from his daughter and to respond to his cooperative behaviour in kind.

The Present was shot, in part, at the real Checkpoint 300 just outside Bethlehem, a place with an ugly reputation, but you don't need to be familiar with that in order to pick up on the sense that something awful could happen at any moment. Whilst Yousef handles the situation with the supreme patience of a man who has to endure such humiliations daily, Yasmine has more mundane but, for her, equally distressing problems to deal with. It's the moments where ordinary, ubiquitous concerns meet the specific terrors of living with checkpoints like this that the film draws its power from.

Nabulsi, a Palestinian who grew up in the UK, directs with supreme confidence, capturing the rhythms of life and showing a deep understanding of the perspectives of her different characters. The acting is superb all round. She also balances the drama beautifully so that it's not unrelentingly grim. The deep love between father and daughter gives it warmth and ensures that we see its protagonists as more than just victims.

The recipient of a well deserved Oscar nomination, this is a film you won't forget in a hurry.