But the film has just as powerful a resonance in today’s world where Palestinians’ lives of pain, injustice, violence, and deprivation are normalised, just as they were then.
The Dupes is based on Kanafani’s iconic novel, Men in the Sun, set in the 1950s and published in 1962.
Salah was unable to get sufficient support in Egypt for making the
film and eventually left for Damascus, where he collaborated with some
great actors from a rich artistic milieu, notably Bassam Lotfi Abu Ghazaleh, a Palestinian refugee from Tulkarem, and Syrians Mohamed Kheir-Halouani, Abdul Rahman al Rashi, Saleh Kholoki, and the cinematographer Bahgat Heidar.
The film originally came out in 1972 and was shown at festivals in Moscow and Tunis. Salah died 10 years ago.
The restored version shown at the London Film Festival was the meticulous work of many hands: the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna,
in collaboration with Salah’s family and the National Film
Organisation, with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
The film takes place in the 1950s and centres on three Palestinian men’s lives as refugees in Iraq.
All of them are destitute, desperate, and in shock from the recent destruction in 1948 of their previous lives in Palestine.
They are from three generations and have met by chance in Basra, each looking for a smuggler’s route across the desert to Kuwait where they believe they will find work.
Crushed
The film uses long flashbacks to build up the characters and the past
and present lives of each of them so vividly that we know them and
identify with them and the life trauma they are struggling through.
The oldest, Abu Qais, is crushed by the loss of his beloved land,
which was his identity, along with shame at the impotence of poverty of
life in a refugee camp.
Assad, probably in his early thirties, borrows 50 dinars from his
uncle to make the journey to find work and a future. The loan comes with
an agreement to marry the uncle’s daughter, which he has no wish
whatever to do.
Brief glimpses of the girl and her mother as the two men make the
deal show their own desperation at the cul de sac of their refugee life.
The girl brings him a cup of coffee with a shy, quick smile, showing
how much she hopes that perhaps Assad will like her, and can be a future
for the family.
Assad is immediately tricked by the first smuggler he tries, and is
left stranded in the desert having paid over half his dinars. He makes
his way back to start again, extremely wary.
The third man, Marwan, is only 16 and a schoolboy bent on studying to
become a doctor. His older brother is in Kuwait and has been sending
the family money every month to support his father, mother, and five
children in a miserable shack.
But he has sent Marwan a private letter telling him he has got
married and won't be sending any more money, and he should not tell his
parents, but stop going to school and take on the burden of supporting
the family.
Marwan’s father, who constantly complains bitterly about his living
conditions, and is vile to his wife, then abruptly deserts the family.
He has been offered the chance to marry a woman who has lost a leg
and never found a husband. Her father is willing to give a house to the
potential husband. For Marwan’s father, to have a house with a roof
again and a room he can rent out for an income is a chance he does not
hesitate to seize.
The fourth key character is Abdul Khaizuram, a Palestinian truck
driver who bargains hard with the three to drive them to Kuwait.
Assad bargains fiercely, he will not pay until they arrive.
Khaizuram’s background too emerges in flashbacks on the long empty road
in the burning heat.
He was a freedom fighter, captured and castrated in 1948, tears
running with the sweat on his face as the image of the operation comes
into his mind after one of the men asks him if he is married. "Better to
lose your manhood than your life," the surgeon told him.
He ends up doing a humiliating, hard job, driving back and forth
alone across the harsh desert for a rich man in Kuwait, and dreaming
only of money, ready to take small sums from fellow Palestinians risking
their lives for the chance of the dignity of work.
Horrible moment of inhumanity
The four rattle over the desert, Abu Qais in the passenger seat and
the other two on top, hanging on, with no protection from the sun, with
wind and sand coating their hair and faces. They know they will have to
get into the truck's stifling steel tank twice as it crosses the border
posts, while the driver insists it will not be for more than six or
seven minutes each time as his papers are checked.
At the first stop, he climbs up to open the tank hatch, briefly dips
his face in, and tells them to take their shirts off. The tension
between him and the three others is palpable as they search each others’
faces, knowing there is no turning back.
They lower themselves in and the top is sealed. At the border, Abul
Khaizuram runs from one office to another getting signatures from the
guards, all of whom know him well.
When he stops at a distance in the desert and unlocks the hatch he
has to drag each man out slowly. They are in their underpants, limp, all
dignity gone. They fall onto the ground in the shade of the truck,
absolutely shell-shocked, weakly contesting his assertion it was only
eight minutes.
Abul Khaizuram tries to hurry them to get going, takes a huge drink
himself from a water bag, and pours the rest over his head and body as
they watch him. It is a horrible moment of inhumanity. He then abruptly
says that Marwan can squeeze into the passenger seat with Abu Qais, as
they are both thin.
The atmosphere, aided by the subtle music of Solhi el-Wadi grows more
and more tense as they approach the second border and the three know
only too well what awaits them as they slide back inside the tank
half-naked.
Three smug Kuwaiti border guards, in their cool office, enjoy teasing
the sweating Abul Khaizuram about how his rich boss has asked six times
for news of his whereabouts and knows he was dallying with a prostitute
in Basra, and they want to meet her too.
The minutes pass as tension and desperation mount and they hold his
papers just out of reach as they mock him. A shot meanwhile shows the
truck outside and there is the sound of banging from the tank. No one
hears it.
Hopeless plea
In the last minutes of the film, Abdul Khaizuram flings a small bundle of clothes from the truck window.
Then Salah shows the final indignity of the three men, in their
underpants on a rubbish dump in the desert. Abu Qais’s rigid body has
his arm stretched upwards in a last hopeless plea.
Kanafani in his life and work was a man whose 'banging on the tank' was heard and still is
The novel’s last words are: "Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the
tank? Why didn’t you bang the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?"
Kanafani in his life and work was a man whose "banging on the tank"
was heard and still is, both in his books and in the bright life-filled
kindergartens in several of Beirut’s refugee camps, run by his widow,
Annie Kanafani.
He was a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine and was assassinated by a Mossad car bomb, with his teenage
niece Lamees Najim in Beirut in 1972.
His obituary in Lebanon’s Daily Star stated that "he was a commando
who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena
the newspaper pages".
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.