New Release: Miral Blu-ray and DVD

Miral movie scene

Freida Pinto stars in the controversial Miral.

Anchor Bay released the controversial political film Miral on Blu-ray and DVD on July 12, 2011.

The movie is directed by Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls) and stars Freida Pinto (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), Hiam Abbass and Willem Dafoe (Antichrist).

A drama centered on an orphaned Palestinian girl (Pinto) growing up in the wake of Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict, the 2010 movie was written by Israeli journalist Rula Jebreal (Schnabel’s girlfriend) and based on her 2010 novel of the same name.

The Arab-Israeli subject is always a controversial one, and Miral didn’t arrive in the theaters in late March 2011 for its limited U.S. release without making some noise of its own. Initially rated R by the MPAA for “some violent content including a sexual assault,” it was later reclassified to PG-13 for “thematic material, and some violent content including a sexual assault” after an appeal of the R rating by the theatrical distributors The Weinstein Company.

More notable — and sad — is that on April 4, a week after the film’s U.S. premiere, actor and peace activist Juliano Merr-Khamis, who plays Seikh Saabah in the film, was shot to death in his car outside a theater he had established in a Palestinian refugee camp.

The Blu-ray and DVD carry the list prices of $39.98 and $29.98, respectively.

Here’s the film’s trailer:

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.