Miral

With The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, director Julian Schnabel's last outing, fascinating and depressing us all in equal measure, there were high hopes for his next film. Miral might not live up to those hopes but it will tug at the heartstrings and its message is a solid and timely one.

Based on a true story, we first meet the titular character Miral (Pinto) as she is sent by her father to a Jerusalem orphanage, founded by the kind-hearted Hind (Abbass), at the age of seven. Growing up in the safe confines of the institute, Miral has no idea of the worldly troubles going on outside the walls until, aged seventeen, she is given a job teaching at a refugee camp. Suddenly enraptured by the horrors of war and her love of PLO leader Hani (Omar Metwally, who will play Amun in the upcoming Breaking Dawn), Miral is torn between this new life and her mentor's teachings that education and understanding is the only path to peace.

There is a lengthy back-story to this film: Miral opens in 1947 where we are introduced to Hind (Abbass), a wealthy woman who opens her doors to fifty-five homeless children; she is helped by kind soldier (Dafoe) and the orphanage's numbers rise to the hundreds. The story is then taken over by Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri), a teenager who, after being raped by her father, runs away from home into the arms of Islamic leader Jamal (Alexander Siddig). Nadia struggles to put her past behind her and falls into alcoholism, leaving Jamal with daughter Miral.

Making a film that spans twenty-five years and encompasses many viewpoints, Miral was always going to be a tricky venture. After the intimate story of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, which was shot entirely from inside a man's mind, it's easy to see why Schnabel wanted to break out to tackle a wide range of characters. But in doing so, he fails to nail down any specific character in detail and Miral wanders over the years looking for something other than its message – tolerance – to sink its teeth into and comes up short.