ONE NIGHT ONLY! OMAR by Hany Abu-Assad 2013 | Drama | 98 min (Arabic/Hebrew with English subtitles) | Rated: R BOSTON PREMIERE February 28, 2014 7:30 pm West Newton Cinema The Boston Palestine Film Festival is thrilled to bring you a one-night limited engagement of the Oscar-nominated film (dir. Hany Abu-Assad) in time for Oscars weekend! OMAR is Palestine’s official Foreign Language Film Academy Award contender – and may be the first Palestinian film to win the coveted gold statue. Shot on Palestinian land in the Occupied West Bank and financed entirely by private Palestinian funds, OMAR has “Palestine” as its official country of origin in the Oscar Foreign Film roster. And unlike Abu-Assad’s first Academy Award-nominated film it was written and shot with an exclusively Palestinian crew and without outside censorship or permits. A love story turned complex political thriller, OMAR follows the gripping story of a young Palestinian baker (Adam Bakri) caught in the chaos that comes with living under military occupation. Without basic freedoms to live a normal life, he regularly scales the Separation Wall that divides his world from other Palestinians – namely his two best friends, Tarek () and Amjad (Samer Bisharat), and Tarek’s sister, Nadia (). But when an attack in the name of armed resistance unfolds, an Israeli soldier is killed and Omar is caught in the middle. Tricked into an admission of guilt by association, Omar is offered a way out by Agent Rami (Waleed Zuaiter) by becoming an informant against his own people. Shot in the Palestinian cities of Nazareth and Nablus in the Occupied West Bank, OMAR brings up one of the main controversial taboos in Occupied Palestinian communities: Collaboration. An issue rarely confronted and readily avoided in mainstream discourse, director Hany Abu-Assad says that this was an intentional decision, made for a very important reason. “One of the crimes that is truly devastating, [is to] make people collaborate against their own brothers and sisters,” he said in an interview with HuffPost Live. By doing this, he explained, an outside force can destroy an entire people from the inside out. “When people lose trust in each other, everything collapses.” OMAR premieres in Boston on Friday, February 28, 7:30pm, at Buy your tickets online here or at the West Newton Cinema box office.