The Syrian Bride is not just a film Samar's dream: war defeats

SARA 'for love, with a capital A, it always ends with the passionate, the better it is contrasted. Or will it be because the story of the blonde and the moustachioed Nabih Samar, separated by a Syrian Druze border war, follows the script of Syrian Bride, The winning entry of Israel Eran Riklis. The fact is that yesterday thousands of virtual guests, most from the East but also from the West, attended on Facebook at the wedding between the two, blessed with the International Red Cross.

The story began long ago, three years ago and earlier when Nabih, 40, met on the road Samar, 25, in the village of Hadhar the Golan Heights. "It was love at first sight," says a witness at the wedding, Ali Al Aour. To understand the myriad bureaucratic tangles, mental, emotional, come to complicate the meeting, however, agrees that making a leap backward in time.

Revise a chapter of the eternal conflict in the Middle East: that of the Golan, a fertile plateau nestled in southwestern Syria, inhabited for centuries by the Druze - proud people, a cult follower of esoteric - won two-thirds by Israel in 1967. The war, as often happens, disrupt the families such as geography: two thirds of the Druze thrown under Israeli administration, separated by the other third in the country of Syrian origin.

A portion of the heights was conquered from Syria in 1973, which claims the entire refund. Since then a UN peacekeeping force monitors the demilitarized strip of land that runs along the ceasefire line. And it is that strip the formidable obstacle to the union between Samar and Nabih. "It was a really exciting marriage, a copy of the film Riklis, but this is reality," sums Marco Succi, ICRC delegate from the two promised to escort to the border.

"Since 2007, waiting for permission from the Israeli authorities because his wife passed by the Syrian Golan to the one administered by Israel denied permission every time." Until yesterday, the veto has been dropped. She hath been approached, with the white wedding dress, the clouds of barbed wire from the Syrian side, with the huge entourage of extended family, parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, nephews, jubilant choirs between traditional Arab and howls of women, loaded with food for the banquet.

He was waiting with his tribe of children and the elderly beyond the barriers of kilometers beneath the flags of Israel, dressed in Western suits and ties. For years, remember friends, "you Samar Nabih and shouted through megaphones her love between the roar of Israeli military jeeps over those networks bones, at the point where the distance is less." She went to the village of Ain El-Tinehir, he Majdal Shams.

The phone lines between the two countries technically at war, are forbidden. It is not the first time in Samar s'agghinda wedding had already made on Dec. 28, her hair in the style of the famous film star in the Druze Farid al-Atrash. The stamp is denied by Israel, the families had been rejected.

Not surprisingly, yesterday, on the elevation of the bars, "she literally ran to meet, on both sides," says Sooade Messoud, the Red Cross from the Syrian side. "The older ones were seen in decades, the younger for the first time." In the middle of the UN buffer zone, have laden the banquet.

"But, it's a bittersweet joy," reflects Sooade. "The bride never smile, even as his mother wept." Once across the border, can not go back. Bruise in the sky 5 degrees of the Golan in the middle of winter and resumed Ali Al Our, "the joy he gave to silence. Samara sought to start the train, alone, along the dividing line.

One look at her, left behind ". But to complete the story, do not miss the voice of the filmmaker Eran Riklis, had already fascinated by the many Samar, the Syrian brides in waiting list. On the phone from Israel, Riklis says: "The fact I had moved, I did my best to transpose to the screen.

My part as a director is to observe and describe objectively. Yet," he concludes, "I can not be objective in front of the human suffering. I leave it to the public the privilege of deciding which side to be in history forever sad, but ever the optimist, the peoples of the Middle East. "

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