Ghadi review

★★★★☆

Release Date: October 31, 2013

Director: Amin Dora 

Producers: Gabriel Chamoun

Main Cast: Georges Khabbaz, Emmanuel Khairallah, Lara Matar, Camille Salameh

Ghadi is a movie following a father desperately trying to get his son to be accepted by their small city in Lebanon, El Mshakkal. When the father, Leba and his wife Lara have their first boy, Ghadi, it was hard for them to come to terms with the fact he was disabled. Before Ghadi, the couple had to able bodied girls, but eventually the family grew to love Ghadi just as much as the girls, and see that having a child isn't a curse, but a blessing if you accept it to be. The city though, is not as accepting as Ghadi's family learned to become. They were very hateful toward both Ghadi and his family and spread false rumors that Ghadi was a curse over the entire city, and banned together to get him taken away from the city for good. To prevent this from happening Leba went through tremendous lengths to convince the city that Ghadi is an angel.

I really enjoyed this movie, initially I was a little off put as to why Ghadi wasn't as much in the movie as I thought he would be. Although the whole plot was based around him, I had figured that he would play a more included character with more complexity, lines, and scenes. But- the longer I watched I began to think of it differently than I ever had before. See, so many times in media when we have representation with disabilities (even if played by someone with a disability), it's always so focused on what people with disabilities are capable of, and very centered around building that character up to do something no one thought they could. Now, I am no where nearly saying that people with disabilities are not capable of doing the things able bodied people are, or that they are any different than able bodied; but what I am saying is that some people with disabilities are lower functioning than others, and I think it's important that we also give them representation as well.

Out of 1,118 IMDb voters, Ghadi was given a score of a 7.3/10. 22.6% of those voters gave Ghadi it's highest rating of a 10/10, and 3.1% gave Ghadi it's lowest rating a 1/10. I was a bit surprised with the overall rating of this movie because I thought it would have been a little higher. I thought the complexity of the movie, as well as the representation that you don't see as much was really great. I think showing the length that a father would go through for his son was spot on and done really well, because the love of a parent is very powerful. I really loved this movie, and don't have anything to really critique about it honestly. The reason I gave it a 4/5 stars instead of a 5/5 is simply because it doesn't check every perianal box to make it a 5/5 for me. To be a 5/5 I need a little bit of every genre, comedy, action, romance, drama, suspense. And although Ghadi did have a lot of those it just wasn't a jaw dropping 5/5, perfect movie to me; but it was great and I would recommend to everyone.