Central To Omar Character Themes

Central to Omar’s narrative are the conflicting themes of confinement and freedom. Omar, Amjad, Tarek, and Nadia, all dream of a day when they will be free from the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Freedom to the Palestinian characters means the ability to lead their lives on their own terms, without intervention from a military-police state, without fear of even minor actions being scrutinized as open aggression. But this freedom is merely a dream, something for each character to escape to in order to reconcile their reality. The Palestinian characters exist in a world of confinement, their daily lives restricted to political and security boundaries beyond their control. And in accepting their confined reality they balance dreams of a world outside occupation to maintain a sense of identity, a measure of sanity. The camera acts as an agent of confinement, preventing any individual freedom from growing too much. It limits how and how far the Palestinian characters can move through close-up and tight framework. Omar masterfully frames the dream of freedom from within confinement through consistent camera work. Shots are framed either at an extremely close angle, …show more content…
When out in the open, shots enable a unique juxtaposition of a wide open world that is inaccessible to any of the characters. The world itself is free, however the characters are not. For Omar specifically these shots limit his movement capabilities: he is confined to a world he longs to escape, but not one he can ever escape to. Urban borders and structures force him to remain in a world of captivity, and aided by the camera any notion of freedom is even more narrow. He must navigate through a constricted city, a tiny world where captivity and imprisonment could occur around any corner. Although he can very skillfully make his way around his world, the camera constantly reminds us that his world is much smaller than it