The Present

The Present (2020)

الهدية

On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?

Date of release
2020-02-02
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (59)
Runtime
24m
Genres
Drama
Director
Farah Nabulsi

Casting

Interesting facts

The Present is a 2020 short film directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, about a father and daughter in the Palestinian enclaves of the Israeli-occupied West Bank trying to buy a wedding anniversary gift. The cast is led by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri. It was released on Netflix on 18 March 2021, and won the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film in addition to being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

Production

The opening scene of Yusef waiting to cross the border of the enclave was produced on location with guerrilla filmmaking; Nabulsi described it as "probably the most rewarding scene” in the film to make":

The only fiction in that scene is our protagonist, Yusef... All the other hundreds of Palestinians you see there are actual Palestinians going to work at the crack of dawn... I have a whole philosophical conversation we could have about who should we be asking permissions from to film such a monstrosity … I just decided we were going to take that risk.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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