November 1979: The film Monty Python's Life of Brian is released in the UK. I go to see it at the ABC Haymarket cinema in Newcastle. Built in 1933 to hold 1,280 people, the theatre's decor was intended to be an orientalist fantasy with camel and palm tree friezes which happened to be the perfect venue for a movie purportedly set in the Holy Land. The sell-out audience is almost entirely made up of students like myself. Each scene skewers human self-deception, irrationality and ignorance with relentless glee. At the time it seems that we are laughing at the past, the ridiculous world of our parents and grandparents. Unfortunately it later turns out that we are laughing at our own future.
What a terribly profound backstory. Patient and thoughtful.
Thank you for relaying your visit to Jerusalem, and for your remembrances of the Palestinian, Jewish, and Christian experience in the region.
I found it particularly moving to read:
"When the people here live together in peace like brothers, it will be wonderful."
Perhaps if Ismail's sentiment was shared more broadly across the globe, we might conjure a peace unlike anything seen before.
There is an undeniable hope where there is kinship.
Thank you again for sharing,
till next time,
L