The Syrian Bride (La Fiancée syrienne)

Israeli director Eran Riklis made the 2004 drama-comedy The Syrian Bride (Hebrew: HaKala HaSurit), a co-production of France, Israel and Germany. Made by Eran Riklis Productions and MACT Productions, it runs 97 minutes and is spoken in Arabic, Hebrew and English. It won four awards at international festivals, among them the Bangkok film festival. An aggregate of about forty-two reviews rates it 86 percent positive, with an average score of 7.1 out of 10.

The film is set in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. The family's younger daughter is about to marry a man from the Syrian side of the border whom she has never seen, and she knows that once she crosses over she cannot come back. As the wedding day nears, the unresolved political situation and the tightly controlled frontier affect every member of the family differently, with bureaucratic obstacles tangled up in personal reckonings. Hiyam Abbas, Makram Khoury, Clara Khoury, Ashraf Barhom and Tarik Kopty lead the cast, with Ali Süleyman also in the cast.

Riklis wrote the screenplay with Suha Arraf. The film looks at the Arab-Israeli conflict through the daily life of a family divided by political borders and shows how the region's harsh realities fracture private lives.