ABSTRACT
Kamel’s mother, Nai’la (née Mary Rosenthal) is the Egyptian-born daughter of an Italian Catholic woman and an Egyptian Jewish man. Upon her marriage to Saʿad, the director’s father, she converted to Islam and adopted a new name. Mary/Na’ila and Saʿad who, among other things, both worked as journalists, were communist activists, an affiliation for which both have been arrested and jailed. Mary/Na’ila and Saʿad’s marriage, reaching across ethno-national and religious lines, represents a link in a long chain of such unions stretching back into the family’s past and forward to the younger generation. Kamel’s sister, Dina, married a Palestinian named ʿAli Shaʿath, the son of Nabil Shaʿath, a leading figure in Fatah who, among other roles, served as the first Foreign Minster of the Palestinian Authority. Constructed around the family stories Mary/Na’ila tells Dina’s son Nabil, named after his paternal grandfather, the film is as much anchored in the relationships between the living generations as it is in family history. In her blog, the director writes about her motivation to make the film: “In a world where my family’s identities are being squeezed into irreconcilable positions, I needed to document my history before I became apologetic about it and the myth of its extinction was realized.”1
