Al-Kasaba Film Festival ends tomorrow with Arna’s Children (which is on my to-watch list ). Today I could finally make it to Al-Balad Theater and I watched with my friend Ola and her cousin Goal Dreams. When you know that it’s about the Palestinian football team, you’ll probably think it’s just another documentary about a football team struggling to be on top, but the documentary is about young men who came from different cultures but shared the same origin, struggling to play under the same flag. It merely recorded what they had gone through from their suffering on checkpoints for days, to separation with families that rely solely on them, to refugees who have no passports and are denied jobs and essential rights such as home ownership (case in point Lebanon).

They spoke different languages, they came from different countries, some of them didn’t understand Arabic, some didn’t understand English and some knew only Spanish. No training facilities, not enough money for medical treatments and not enough time to know each other and learn how to play as a team. It seemed like everything sucked. And it was too real to laughingly say how can some people be so unlucky. I admit that I found the translation problem they’ve faced pretty funny, but how funny was the Palestinian-Lebanese player’s life? it’s been 70 years since his family arrived to Lebanon and they’re still treated like homeless people.

The Palestinian-American player at first said he loved both America and Palestine and felt no conflict of interests at all, he sounded confident in his love until he experienced life in Palestine, albeit not fully, but enough to make him re-think about it and start asking questions.

This wasn’t about winning the World Cup, they had a much simpler dream, having a national league! with very few organizations representing Palestine as a country, football becomes another desperate way to say Palestine is a country, and Palestinians have the right not only to play football. They have the right to dream, and see their dreams coming true while maintaining their identities as Palestinians.

P.S turns out Al-Balad Theater is actually called Amman Cinema so don’t bother with taxi drivers. If you manage to get there, don’t look for signs because there isn’t any (at least none that I could see), you’ll find it on your right hand if you’re coming up the stairs that are right opposite to the central post office. Show time is 7:00 PM.
For up coming cultural events in Jordan keep an eye on Samer’s and Lina’s blogs

On a lighter note, I had my first falafel sandwich (I had two actually) from Hashim’s restaurant!