Educational Media Reviews Online

Culled from interviews conducted just two months after the fall of Baghdad in May, 2003, Twenty Years Old in the Middle East offers a newsworthy picture of a youthful Middle East not all that familiar to Western audiences, at least not in the United States, and a shame it isn’t. The interviewees are not entirely twenty-somethings – a parent and a professor or two are also allowed their say. The countries visited are Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The students who speak include an Egyptian woman, Dina, studying in Lebanon (who slyly comments, “Don’t make me say more – I want to return to my country one day!”) and two Palestinians, Abbud and Badder, living in Jordan – the last two perhaps the most down-spirited of the lot. For the most part, the students are intelligent, earnest, serious, understandably concerned about the world they live in, understandably concerned about what the future will bring. Two of them express profound shock that Saddam fell so swiftly. Most express disillusionment and, not unexpectedly, growing resentment toward the United States, sometimes in banal terms, sometimes more perceptively. The United States and Israel are the oppressors, the instruments of the humiliation of the Arab peoples. Extremism, though, is generally rejected. One woman, Zeina, discards a Western-style dress she never wore because she’s since taken to wearing a hijab. A second woman, Lina, rejects the hijab, despite her mother’s pleas that wearing one will make men respect her more for who she is rather than for what she looks like. Regrettably the film is somewhat disfigured by a preachy narrator who takes, or so it seems, the anti-Americanism expressed almost gleefully for granted. (The film is a French production, though the voiceover is English and subtitles are provided for the French, Arabic, and Persian on the soundtrack.)

Interestingly, perhaps the most pro-American sentiments are expressed by the young Iranians interviewed, Hyam Pourla, Haniyah, Ana, and Sara – despite, or maybe due to, their government’s heavy-handed propaganda. More moving than anything else is the universal call from all the students for more freedom, greater freedom – freedom of expression, freedom from fear, freedom to travel outside the obviously constrained environment they live in. Thus the effects of oppressive government weigh heavily on the idealistic young, and all the more reason to make the film available to often complacent American undergraduates.