Speed Sisters | Little White Lies

Speed Sis­ters

24 Mar 2016 / Released: 25 Mar 2016

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Amber Fares

Starring N/A

Close-up of a person wearing a red racing helmet and blue overalls inside a vehicle.
Close-up of a person wearing a red racing helmet and blue overalls inside a vehicle.
3

Anticipation.

A neat new angle on life in Palestine.

3

Enjoyment.

Great characters and drama both on and off the track.

3

In Retrospect.

It’s a scrappy piece of work, but all the more fascinating for it.

Meet Palestine’s only all-female motor­sport team in this insight­ful doc­u­men­tary form Amber Fares.

There’s some­thing heart­en­ing­ly ram­shackle about Amber Fares’ fly-on-the-dash­board doc­u­men­tary which glances into the lives of a Pales­tin­ian, all-female motor­sport team. It cer­tain­ly puts paid to F1 chief Bernie Eccleston’s recent remarks that women dri­ving cars just look sil­ly”.

There are rival­ries and tantrums, heroes and vil­lains, but the mate­r­i­al remains loose­ly episod­ic, nev­er forcibly cob­bled into a stan­dard­ised sports movie arc. So where the struc­ture of a mul­ti-race cham­pi­onship gives the film its basic momen­tum, Fares is just as inter­est­ed in look­ing into her char­ac­ters’ equal­ly-event­ful per­son­al lives.

Marah, Mona, Bet­ty and Noor are the cho­sen pro­tag­o­nists, front and cen­tre being the antag­o­nism between glam­orous media dar­ling Bet­ty, and home­ly, mod­est Marah. It soon becomes obvi­ous that Speed Sis­ters can’t offer a con­ven­tion­al sports movie nar­ra­tive due to the tumult of exten­u­at­ing polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances, and it’s this sur­feit of small bar­ri­ers which make the movie so compelling.

The prob­lems of your prac­tice track being locat­ed in a spot which may mean hav­ing to dodge fly­ing tear gas can­is­ters gives some idea of what these women are up against. And then you’ve got the tide of cul­tur­al con­ser­vatism that dic­tates that what these women are doing is offen­sive and they should real­ly all be work­ing as nurs­es. And on top of that, the sports fed­er­a­tion in which the women are com­pet­ing (run entire­ly by men, of course) is cor­rupt to its mar­row, with rules lit­er­al­ly being cre­at­ed and jus­ti­fied via per­son­al whim.

It’s always the back­ground detail that’s most inter­est­ing – the dra­ma comes from the women actu­al­ly get­ting to the track, not from their activ­i­ties at the track itself. The film avoids direct­ly dis­cussing the fraught and vio­lent polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, though Fares makes sure its evi­dent in every frame.

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