Hopefully for the Best

Director Raed Helou describes Ramallah during the tense winter before the US invasion of Iraq as “calm, like snow on graves, and angry as an old woman who has lost everything.” The curious monotony of life during an uprising is the subject of the peripatetic camera that roams the rain-slashed streets of Ramallah. In brief encounters with Ramallah’s street sweepers, bakers and hummus makers, anxiety simmers below the surface, but everyone seeks a bit of “normal” life in the early morning, before political realities take hold of the day.