Berakah meets Berakah, screened during the Ahbab festival at the Cambridge Junction (12-14th February 2017), was one of a handful of films carefully curated for the four day event by Nahla Al-Ageli, of the Nahla Ink Online Journal. Her website is a collection of musings about and insights into ‘the Arab’, and the films she chose reflected this.  A surprisingly humorous film and director Mahmoud Sabbagh’s directing debut, Berakah meets Berakah, is filled with dark undertones of censorship, allusions to the repressive state of Saudi society, and the tense dynamic this creates between the young and the traditional.

Centred around an unlikely love story, the film is constantly confronting its audience with the frustrations of modern life in a traditional society.  Berakah, a municipal civil servant of modest upbringing, represents the repression; circling his neighbourhood shutting down various activities deemed illegal in the eyes of the state. Whereas Bibi, the adopted daughter of an affluent family and a social media sensation, represents the flashier side of society and the paradoxes of the structural censorship under which they live – epitomising the conflict between the modern digital age and the extreme conservatism still lingering in Saudi Arabia. In fact the film opens with a mocking statement declaring, “the pixelisation you see in this film is totally normal. It is not a commentary on censorship. We repeat, it is not a commentary on censorship.” However, later in the film, certain ‘illegal’ elements such as Bibi’s stomach, or alcohol being consumed by her father, are purposefully pixelated in order to avoid ‘indecent exposure’.

“Berakah meets Berakah is filled with dark undertones of censorship, allusions to the repressive state of Saudi society, and the tense dynamic this creates between the young and the traditional”

The social commentary does not stop there. In a country where meeting in public unchaperoned and physical contact are absolutely forbidden, ‘dating’ is a phase of a relationship that becomes extremely difficult to negotiate, something which, we, as a Western audience, may never have considered.

Indeed to a Western audience this film is definitely thought provoking. It offers a beautifully raw, realistic, yet relatable perspective of modern day life in a country that is constantly being portrayed in the media as a misogynist and backwards state. And although if we consider certain aspects of their society may stand to be true, Berakah meets Berakah, is very impactful in conveying the progress, or the subtle subversions people are making in order to get on with their lives. All of this with just the right amount of humour and sass, makes it all-round a thoroughly enjoyable film