Barakat

Barakat started as a comedy and ended up being about grief. At first sight, we appeared to want to tell a lighthearted story about a family of feuding brothers brought together to sabotage their mother’s love life. What the film actually wanted to be about, is how we deal with the loss of one of our own – in this case, a father and patriarch.The story became about a family grappling with a legacy that has left an empty seat at their table.For me, it is about how we honour familial, collective memory even as life moves on.That difficulty, of ‘moving on’ from the death of a loved one, is a universal theme that speaks to our humanity anywhere in the world. Perhaps that’s why the story we gravitated toward telling was to explore and unpack that grief.But sometimes, pain manifests in absurdity or comedy.And for the Davids family, healing exists at the intersection of conflict, tradition, culture and food.A family forced to confront absence is the heart and the compass here. It is the story we are actually telling.