For a debut documentary feature, Speed Sisters aims high. Director Amber Fares attempts to highlight not only sexism in the Middle East but life under occupation. Her subjects are the first all-female racing team in Palestine, and Israeli conflicts are never far beyond the frame of the camera. Life in Palestine is hard enough, but these women face constant obstacles when it comes to pursuing their dreams. The film assumes a fairly predictable and repetitive structure early on, but its subject matter keeps it engaging.
Documentaries have the capacity to be incredibly humanizing in a way that news and reporting aren’t. When it comes to Palestine, most people don’t know anything about it beyond the violence they see on the news. In that sense, Speed Sisters provides viewers with an essential insight into the realities of day-to-day Palestinian life on the West Bank, which does honestly feature confrontations with Israeli guards. Each of the four racers Fares focuses on has been affected by the Israeli occupation, to varying degrees, and share the common feeling of being trapped within guarded borders. Racing is both their psychological escape and, potentially, the key to their future outside of Palestine.
Fares structures the documentary around a season’s worth of racing, inserting interviews with the women and their families between competitions. These familial tangents highlight obstacles they have faced in being allowed to pursue racing as well as the socioeconomic realities of supporting an amateur racing career under occupation. Three racers are profiled as well as the team manager, but a fourth racer, Mona, is barely shown and her personal life left unexplored, except to say that she races for nothing more than the fun of it and has a bad habit of wrecking her cars while simply driving through the city. Speed Sisters is at its best when focusing on Marah Zahalka and team manager, Maysoon Jayyusi. The former dreams only of racing, despite its strain on her family and tension caused by her competitive rivalry with fellow racer, Betty Saadeh. The latter met a fellow racing enthusiast and is in the process of preparing for their wedding and her move to Jordan.
The balance between hardcore racing and traditionally feminine pursuits makes Speed Sisters a fascinating look into feminism and the lives of women in the Middle East. Marah’s grandfather openly says he doesn’t think a woman should be racing, but he loves and supports his granddaughter. Betty, the diva of the team, gloats about the media attention she gets, saying, “The media is always after me because I know how to talk to them and I’m beautiful.” Maysoon is the happy medium between the two, unabashed about her love of racing but also the owner of a fashionable clothing store. Fares is clear to show that everyone has cultural and/or religious reservations about women racing, but the massive crowds at their competitions—as well as their international attention—speak for themselves.
With the exception of Maysoon, who dreams of returning to Palestine to raise her future family, each of the racers feels the constraints of life under occupation, the most overwhelming feelings being that of isolation and confinement. For Maysoon and Noor, who were both born in Jerusalem and therefore have Israeli IDs, temporary escape is possible with a trip to the shores of the Mediterranean—a trip potentially made hours longer by Israeli checkpoints. Marah envies them, even though she clearly loves her hometown of Jenin (which Betty cruelly characterizes as rural and backwards). Even if these women don’t want to leave their homeland, the world beyond the armed walls offers the enticing promise of freedom they don’t experience.
Fares hits on a fascinating approach to humanizing both the people of Palestine and women in the Middle East with Speed Sisters. It bears the hallmarks of a debut feature but shows immense promise in its eye for intriguing and evocative story.
The post Speed Sisters appeared first on Spectrum Culture.