An Arab Western hits the trail – on camels

By Daniel Nelson

Theeb

Image by Theeb

And they perform magnificently, as do the largely novice cast, producers and director.

There are strangers coming to town, ambushes and shoot-outs, tough guys digging bullets out of their legs, snatched guns, bandits and betrayals. And Bedouin and camels.

Director Naji Abu Nowar - whose first full-length feature this is – is keen to emphasise that it’s based on Bedouin stories and culture and though it’s been made on a comparatively small budget the backdrop is magnificent.

It’s set in the early 1900s, when the Ottoman empire is crumbling and a railway is ushering in a new era - as in many a Western. But social traditions remain, which is why a Bedouin family has to help two mysterious visitors, one of them an English soldier, who loom out of the desert blackness one night.

The pair must be escorted to a little-used well in bandit country, and Theeb, the inquisitive young brother of the escort, Hussein, follows on his donkey.

That’s the start of an epic adventure, which Theeb survives, through luck, grit and determination, only to find himself teamed up and fighting for survival with his brother’s killer – a man whose livelihood has been taken away by the railroad and turns to crime to make a living, just as Somali pirates do when their fisheries decline.

Theeb is inquisitive and a quick learner, who lives up to his name, which means ‘wolf’, and to his father’s dictum, that the strong eat the weak.

It’s exciting and, with its Eastern twist on the Western, socially fascinating. Both the men and the culture are fighting for a way of life under threat.