Pas une critique !

Restauration vue en VOSTI en fuori orario, à l'occasion de la Biennale 2024.

A film about illegal emigration mostly interesting thanks to its stories and build, but it allows itself the luxury of a bit of thrill toward the end.

You get to see every character prior to their fateful travel, examining the various causes for each generation's decision to look for money in Kuwait. Even the trafficker gets his moment !

(My preference went to the younger boy's backstory.)

Score: 7/10

Enjoyment: 3/5

The Dupes is one of the highest and most powerful masterpieces of Arab cinema, a harrowing story of Palestinian emigration, shot in Syria by a leading Egyptian filmmaker. The film was recently restored by Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with The National Film Organization and the family of Tewfik Saleh. The restored version had its world premiere at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival. Prior to the restoration, the film had already been shown in Italy by Fuori Orario in 1999 and during the I Mille Occhi Festival in 2017.

«They are not the same age, they are not from the same family and village, but Abu, Assad and Marwan share the same dream: a better life in Kuwait, their "promised land." Passeur Abul Khaizuran convinces the three companions in misfortune to attempt crossing the border hidden inside his tanker truck, which turns into a furnace in the desert.

Tewfik Saleh makes a highly political work that also denounces certain Arab governments and shows the game of slaughter in which the powerful watch their people die of hunger and thirst in a suffocating desert. Like a metaphor for the fate of the Palestinian people forced into exile since 1948.»

— Laura Lépine, catalog of the Festival Cinéma du Sud, Lyon, 2024

«I worked on the adaptation of Men Under the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant assassinated on July 9, 1972 in Beirut by Mossad) from 1964 to 1971. My intentions and interpretation of the novel and its characters changed in light of the tragic events that occurred in this region in June 1967 and September 1970. In the latest version of the project, I wanted to emphasize the idea of escape that characterizes the Middle East at this time. Three characters from three different generations, representing three phases of the same collective problem, decide to flee their situation in search of what each considers or hopes to be their individual salvation. But the end is very different from their expectations: there is no individual salvation from a collective tragedy. And this is the lesson that history teaches us every day.»

— Tewfik Saleh, statement collected by Tahar Cherfiaa in Dossiers du cinéma: Cinéastes, Casterman, Paris 1971, reproduced in the catalog of the Festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2023