Arab Film Festival: Love Halal
In Halal Love, director Assad Fouladkar interweaves three tales of love under Sharia law in Beirut.
The film opens with the vibrant and charming Hiba (Berlin Badr) discovering ‘how babies are made’, the stork tale is replaced with the story of the alaka, a worm that walks (and walks and walks) until it reaches the woman’s womb.
Freaked out by this revelation of walking worms, Hiba and her younger sister Nasma (Christy Bared) resort to wearing garbage bags to bed to prevent any worm-driven pregnancies.
Their mother, Awatef (Mirna Moukarzel), in trying to stave of her husband’s persistent affections, comes up with the grand plan of “outsourcing” some of her duties by acquiring a second wife.
Across the hall, their beautiful young neighbour, Batoul (Zeinab Hind Khadra), tries to contain her husband Mokhtar’s (Hussein Mokaddem) jealousies which inevitably spill into the apartment foyer.
In these raging battles of the sexes where the female neighbours side with Batoul and the males stick with the hot-headed Mokhtar, Mokhtar pronounces their divorce one time too many – coming up with an elaborate plan so he can remarry his love under sharia.
Also recently divorced, the beautiful Loubna (Darine Hamze), has liberated herself from a miserable arranged marriage, much to the chagrin of her meddling mother.
Her first step is to begin a temporary marriage – allowed under sharia – with her first love, the charming – but married – greengrocer Ahmed (Rodrigue Sleiman).
Finding the weight of expectation on divorced women oppressive, she must decide between her dreams of following her gay brother to Australia, and her love for Ahmed.
Halal Love handles the mores around marriage with grace and pragmatism. This is no indictment, and the issues each couple face are universal, especially in the women’s stories.
Wives and mothers would certainly empathise with the exhausted Awatef, bearing the brunt of housework and child-rearing – and her husband’s unrelenting sex drive.
Batoul must constantly placate her husband, who oscillates between putting her on a pedestal or dragging her through the mud.
Loubna’s tale is particularly touching; forced into an unwanted marriage she now wears the judgement that comes with divorce and a “failed” relationship.
Persistently laugh-out-loud funny but full of heart, Halal Love is a unique film with surprisingly broad appeal. An inspired inclusion in the touring Arab Film Festival, fingers crossed the film will also receive wider distribution – it’d be a shame to miss it.
The Arab Film Festival is currently touring Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth. For session times and tickets, click here.
