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Bursting with mordant wit and alive with urgent real-life dramatic energy, Rashid Masharawi's Laila's Birthday is a "fleet, dark urban comedy," (New York Times) that "moves at a brisk clip, ticking incidents like a meter on overtime" (Time Out New York).
"At eight o'clock, it's Laila's birthday, okay?" Palestinian judge turned cab driver Abu Laila's wife reminds her husband. But on his young daughter's birthday, like any day, Abu faces a nerve-wracking shift in a Ramallah yellow cab armed only with an ex-jurist's misplaced pride, a father's loyalty, and a sticker reminding passengers that smoking and carrying AK-47's are prohibited. Rather than address politics or document holy war heroics and villainy, Laila's Birthday focuses on the toll that the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict extracts from civilians clinging to both employment and a semblance of normal life amidst chaos and corruption, missile attacks and bursts of gunfire.
"Part Tati, part Chaplin, part absurdist satire," (Village Voice), Laila's Birthday finds surprising humor and remarkable humanity in the fares Abu plucks from the social freefall of a city upended by war, and in the unyielding and often misplaced belief in the rule of law to which its unlikely hero clings en route to a hoped-for family reunion.
Areen Omary