The Attack

In a Tel-Aviv restaurant, a woman sets off a bomb she was hiding underneath her pregnancy dress. All day long, Dr Amine Jaafari, an Israeli of Arab origin, has been operating on the numerous victims of the attack. In the middle of the night, he is called back to the hospital urgently, only to hear that the kamikaze is his own wife. Refusing to believe this accusation, Amine goes off to Palestine, to try and unders- tand what has happened.

“The Attack”, adapted from the novel with the same title by Yasmina Khadra, has the qualities of a great political thriller. It also asks questions which caught my attention, such as, “How can you live in an occupied country without rebelling ?”... We went through all the different hypotheses which might explain Siham’s kamikaze act : her birth on an Israeli barricade which resulted in the death of her mother, a suicidal or bipolar personality, regret at having no professional fulfillment and remaining in Amine’s shadow, etc ... But being satisfied with one explanation only would have been a mistake. The explanation was elsewhere : we had to leave the spectators free to give their own interpretation.” Ziad Doueiri