‘The Stranger’ Review: Glowering, Gorgeously Shot Parable of Occupation and Oppression in the Golan Heights

Gloom, deployed as a storytelling tactic, can exert a strange, unsettling pull when it’s as capably and beautifully conveyed as in Syrian director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s “The Stranger,” recently announced as Palestine’s international Oscar entry. A granular depiction of oppression as a kind of inescapable inheritance handed down from father to son, with mothers and daughters its peripheral, persevering survivors, this striking debut makes its Golan Heights setting — the contested region bordering Syria, Lebanon and Israel — into a place of gulfs, grudges and unquiet ghosts. But it is also attuned to the bleak grandeur of the landscapes in… Read Full Article