review for Al Qods Fee Yom Akhar on AllMovie

Rana's Wedding is a trenchant film about Palestinian life under occupation, dealing with its subject effectively on an intimate human scale, but it occasionally strays into heavy-handedness. Writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, an experienced documentarian, makes excellent use of non-professional actors and his vibrant Jerusalem and Ramallah locations, giving a realistically gritty feel to his story. The story itself has a tried and true feel, as Rana (Clara Khoury) searches for Khalil (Khalifa Natour), the theater director she loves, racing the clock so she can marry him before her disapproving father (Zuher Fahoum) leaves for Egypt. But the specifics of the story give it added resonance. Rana faces her father's (and her society's) restrictive patriarchal attitudes (a theme which Abu-Assad deals with subtly and effectively), but she also deals with this crisis in a land where a cry of frustration directed at a cell phone is cause for a group of Israeli soldiers to train their guns on her, and where a hastily packed handbag, inadvertently left on a street corner for a few minutes, is quickly blown up by a bomb-destroying robot. In these brief scenes, the filmmaker makes his points about occupation wittily and efficiently, so it's a shame he feels it necessary to hammer home the point by having Rana state his case explicitly. At one point, Rana is dashing through a checkpoint where Israeli soldiers are shooting at rock-throwing Palestinian boys, and she actually stops to pick up a stone and throw it herself in a dangerous and completely unnecessary, not to mention unlikely, gesture. Rana's Wedding is a well-made and worthy film, but in dealing with such emotionally potent subject matter, Abu-Assad would have been better off presenting his story without overt politicizing and letting viewers draw their own conclusions.