Chapter 5: Druze, Gender, and Shifting Norms and Israel, Syria, and Borders: Film: The Syrian Bride (2004)

The Syrian Bride, Eran Riklis’ 2004 film, follows a Druze bride in the Golan Heights on her wedding day, examining fraught and shifting gender dynamics exacerbated by family relations and geopolitics. Mona, the bride, belongs to a religious community existing on either side of the Israeli-Syrian border, a tense situation that complicates the logistics and heightens the emotions around her arranged marriage to a Syrian Druze celebrity waiting for her on the other side of the political divide. The historical backdrop to the film is the division of the Druze community on either side of the disputed border between Israel and Syria, resulting from Israel’s occupation and subsequent annexation of the Golan Heights after the Six Day War in 1967. Claimed by Syria and Israel, alike, the geopolitical limbo of the Golan Heights raises questions regarding the ways boundaries and sovereignty impact the daily lives of the Heights’ inhabitants. When bureaucracy and regional conflict conspire to prevent Mona from crossing the border on her wedding day, the hierarchical and gendered relations within her family and across the institutions of nation-states are exposed. Throughout the film, Mona is depicted as being enveloped by social expectations and power disparities that seem to work against her yet the film culminates in her bold act of individual agency that subverts conventions and as she refuses to yield to attempts at her disempowerment. All the while, her sister Amal grapples with her own career sacrifices as a mother and wife while recognizing that her teenage daughter is on the cusp of similar decisions, torn between meeting social expectations or charting her own course. While Mona is denied permission to cross from Israel into Syria, the French female UN observer, Jeanne, is able to cross the border repeatedly, exempt from the restrictions on mobility that inhibit not only Mona’s movement but also her father who is under Israeli police surveillance. In this way, the film indicates that the intersection between gender and geopolitics is more complex than can be understood by simply criticizing “traditional” society and its conventions. Men and women, alike, are disempowered and empowered based on their cultural and political positions within the Druze community and the conflict between Israel and Syria. Gender relations are depicted as fluid and contingent upon power and, at times, individual will.