The first feature-length movie by Palestinian director Tawfik Abu Wael, Atash (aka Thirst) is a confident, beautifully composed film about an Arab family - father, mother, two daughters and a schoolboy son - living in an abandoned village (possibly a former military installation) in a remote, dusty corner of Israel.
They are isolated from their own people through some humiliating incident involving the elder daughter, and alienated from the Israelis. Fire and water inform their lives; they steal from a nearby wood to make charcoal and have built an illegal pipeline to bring water into their courtyard.
The movie has a certain gravitas. But essentially, it's another familiar arthouse fable of hard lives, overbearing patriarchs and oppressive traditions in primitive places, the model for which is Kaneto Shindo's The Island and the most celebrated recent example, Walter Salles's Behind the Sun.
