Incendies

Date

2010

Description

Creator of the image: Denis Villeneuve (director)
Date of the image creation: 2010
Medium of the image: Film
Person depicted: Nawal Marwan as played by Lubna Azabal

This still-frame is taken from a passage that occurs twice in the film, Incendies, a Canadian mystery-drama film adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s play of the same name. The first time is at the start of the film without the context to understand it, and then again at the film’s climax. The first time it occurs, set at a local swimming pool in Quebec, is seen from one twin offspring’s perspective, as a forerunner to the stroke that eventually claimed her mother’s life.

The twins learn that their recently departed mother, Nawal Marwan, has requested that she be buried naked, facedown, without prayer or a tombstone. The twins then get a letter each, one for their father, and one for their half-brother, whose existence was entirely unknown to them. Only after they deliver the letters does Nawal’s will stipulate that a tombstone may be placed on her grave. The film then follows a non-linear narrative, jumping between the twins’ search across contemporary Lebanon, and flashbacks to Nawal’s experiences there, growing up and throughout the civil war.

The second time the passage occurs — at the most climatic moment in the film — it is revealed that Nawal had just randomly met a man whom she realizes is her former torturer from her prison days in Lebanon: the man who raped and impregnated her. More shocking still, she realizes that this man is also her first son to whom she gave birth while very young, and had to surrender to an orphanage. The shock of this double revelation triggers a stroke in Nawal that eventually kills her.

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