In film making; it’s a very hard job to combine between the deep intellectual story and the refined cinematography; with just modest financial resources, making a movie simple, neat and with no difficulties. This treatment is what attracted me first whilst watching this short feature movie, yet a very profound one.

The place: The movie is shot in a single place. A small, tight, dark and miserable place it is. Still, the angle that the shots are taken from; gives you the feeling of extent and makes you see a much bigger scene, in a way it was an illustration of our big and extended Arabic world.

The Set: It can be abbreviated in the shiny, clean and pure floor - just like our souls -. And a unique chair sits alone in the sill of ignorance; the sill of the other; is all what is there.

The Lighting: I think what the director tried to do here is to put (the power that the other have on us) under the spotlight, to spotlight the others’ ability of deciding for us our movements with disrespect, the authority that makes him tell us - even - where to sit and what are the boundaries for our movement under the power of his light. It’s the darkness that we live in mentally and spiritually, it is the darkness that is forced on us by the other, who gives us the information that he wants to give and takes away the rest. And we are like children, afraid of dark.

The Sound: Killing powerful, it doesn’t matter whose the victim is, I wonder how much a bullet coast?

The Cast: The Male\ The Female\ The Young\ The Child\ The modern\ The traditional\ The confidant\ The scared\ The caring\ The insensible\ The close\ The remote\ the unaware\ the powerless\ The mislaid …The absent.

Cinematography: Professional, intact, holds within the life and the death with all the colors that come with both.  Simple.

The Story: plain and simple. In such independent movie; with modest recourse and alternatives, in order to achieve your goals from a project with the slightest amount of scarifications on the artistic level, you have to be as simple and as clear as possible. The message that this short movie is sending across is that: the other (the western world) is looking down at us, controlling us, stipulating our cultural identity for us, driving us in a pre-planned pathways taking us to the point that he want, surrounding us with its light and darkness, tossing it in our face “If you are not with us, you are against us”.

This movie did establish- in its three minutes length- for the mental status scheming the Arabic world. The movie is a real reflection of what goes in peoples’ mind. And the director did a great job with the camera angles which made his shots more effective. Adding to that, the way that he presented his idea: before the gunshot and after the gunshot.

What made it more striking and successful is the open ending for the movie. The child that we see in the end, the gunfire that we hear after her picture is gone, the question that pops up directly in our minds: did it get here too? Maybe it was the director’s\writer’s way of saying: To what extend really? And till when?

To conclude, I have to say; that this short independent movie was shown as an example of the contemporary and young filmmaking scene in UAE, during a research paper and seminar discussion for one of my master courses at Griffith University – Australia in 2005. It was a real joy for me to read the responds on student’s faces directly in the lecture room after seeing the movie, to see the surprises and consent ness, to use a decent and constructive piece of art like movies as a mean and a way to reach out for the other, to make it easier for both sides to come along and understand more about each other and about the surrounding world. It was indeed a very productive discussion.