Rêves et silences

The documentary Dreams and silence hovers between the daily life of a Palestinian refugee in Jordan and the mystical range of ideas of a religious member of parliament. The film tries to expose the discrepancies between modern Islamic thought and the daily life of this female refugee.Against a background of ongoing military and political conflicts between the West and the Arab Muslim world and the renewal of ideological arguments by Arab political movements, the documentary tries to locate these conflicts and arguments in daily reality in order to prevent sterile abstractions. The political and social beliefs of the representative are set alongside the problems of the woman: economic insecurity, a poor education, broken dreams about national liberation, limited personal and social freedom as a woman etc.The film discards obscure fundamentalist ideas and the violent conflicts between the West and the Islamic world. Dreams and Silence tackles the problems in the Middle East from a more humane point of view, despite the fact that the film was shot during the climax of the Gulf War and was finished when the war had already taken its horrifying toll of suffering and destruction in the area.