One performance, and a real one. As the Bedouin boy in Theeb (2014), Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat does almost nothing and the film rests on him; he watches, and we watch him watching. Whether there is more to come is an open question.
Fi1m perspective
Early in Theeb, Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat's older brother lowers him into a well on a rope so that he will learn where the water is. The boy does not protest and does not act afraid. He goes down, he looks, he comes up, and that is his method for the rest of the film. He watches Hussein, he watches the locked wooden box the officer carries, he watches the men who arrive later. Naji Abu Nowar built the film at a child's eye level, and it holds because the child never once asks to be looked at.
He was not an actor and has never trained as one. Abu Nowar and his co-writer Bassel Ghandour went to the Wadi Rum community where he lives, ran acting workshops for eight months, and cast from the people who turned up. Everyone in the film is a Bedouin non-professional speaking their own dialect, which is why nothing about desert life is ever explained to us; the people on screen already know where the water is. That is a method, and it is a good one, but it is also a kind of luck. You only find a boy like this by not holding auditions.
What he gives the film is stillness in a part with hardly any dialogue, and most critics have noticed the same thing we did: that fear, nerve and a child's first moral decisions all arrive in his face without his seeming to do anything to put them there. We were more moved by the early scenes between the brothers than by anything that follows, because Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen plays Hussein as gentle and a little exasperated, and the boy answers that with complete trust, which the film then spends its length testing. When Theeb dawdles in the middle, and it does, he is left simply being present. A coached child would have filled the gap with business. He does not, and the gaps are the film's fault, not his.
Since then, a small part as a Bedouin boy in The Rendezvous (2016), an American film shot in the region, and an appearance as himself on television in 2022. By 2016 he was back at school in Jordan. Asked by journalists in Venice in 2014, through an interpreter, whether he wanted to carry on acting, he said yes. If he does, the thing to hope for is another director with Abu Nowar's patience, because what he had in that well was the one thing a child on screen cannot be taught and can easily be taught out of. Until then there is Theeb, which is enough to be going on with.
Biography
Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat is a Jordanian actor from the Bedouin community in al-Shakriyeh village, Wadi Rum, southern Jordan. He played the title role in the 2014 film Theeb, directed by Naji Abu Nowar.
The film, set during the First World War, was Jordan's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received a nomination. Al-Hwietat, credited as Jacir Eid, was a non-professional actor cast after the director spent time with the tribe; he also appeared in The Rendezvous (2016) as a Bedouin boy.
In 2022 he appeared as himself in an episode of the television series Invitation au voyage.
