Incendies (2012)

Huge spoiler alert!  There is no way to respond to this movie without giving away a central element of the plot—which we learn about 7/8 of the way through the movie, but it goes a long way toward explaining why the movie has a powerful impact.

This is a variation on the Oedipus story—but it is told from Jocasta’s point of view, or, in this case, it is Nawal’s story.  The story opens and comes close to closing at a community swimming center in takes place in a fictional Middle Eastern country which bears a remarkable resemblance to Lebanon, both topographically and politically.  Lebanon was created from the ashes of the Ottoman empire post-WWI as an enclave for the Maronite Christians.  At the time, Christians made up 84% of the territory that became Lebanon, and it was one of the less controversial requests that France and Britain grappled with after the First World War.  But then came WWII and in it’s aftermath, the establishment of Israel out of Palestine.  That brought a large influx of immigrants into Lebanon from the south, and that is where Nawal’s Christian family lived.  She fell in love with a Muslim, which did not sit well with her brothers—he was killed, and so would she have been if not for the intervention of her grandmother.  She is pregnant, and gives birth to a baby she gives up, but not before the grandmother tattoos the babies heel.  Nawal wants to find him in the future.

The war ruins everything.  When her college is closed, Nawal travels southwards in search of her son, and what she finds changes everything—the Muslims have bombed the Christian towns and the Christians are killing Muslim civilians.  It is bedlam and the orphanage has been reduced to rubble.  Nawal becomes militarized by this, and that decision seals her fate once and for all.  She ceases to be a mother and instead becomes a martyr, and she murders and goes to prison for 15 years because of it.  A part of her soul is broken off and while it is not enough to kill her, it is a crippling blow.  Her son was swept up by  war lords who teach him to be a killer, so a piece of his soul is ripped away from him as well, and together they unknowingly create a future problem.  They meet up in prison—she the prisoner, he the torturer, but just like the myth, they do not recognize each other.

Nawal has twins while in prison, and after her release she emigrates to Canada with them—when she discovers the truth, it is too much for her.  She dies, but in death she sends the twins off to discover her past—and theirs.  I am not sure that the truth will help them, and it could very well hurt them—in the myth, Etiocles kills Polynices over ruling Thebes—but they may be able to start working through the trauma that life them off with through no fault of their own.