Shot against the dazzling sun and moody shadows of Galilee, Michel Khleifi's first feature depicts an impossible situation in the occupied West Bank: a Palestinian wedding, which traditionally lasts way into the night, in a village that is under a sundown curfew. The venerable mukhtar (Ali M. El Akili), whose son is to be married, takes his case to the Israeli military commander, who demands an invitation to the wedding and attends like a dark angel. Khleifi (a Palestinian living in Belgium) turns the winding walkways of the village into a setting for an elliptical narrative whose movement, based on flash-forwards, is a grapevine of time and tradition. He captures the wedding from every angle, so that it is an anthropologically fascinating and politically complex event, and also an intensely personal one, the bride and groom suffering under the weight of centuries of tradition. Ultimately, this is a daring portrait of patriarchy as a chain of impotence, rendered by father to son, and oppressor to oppressed.