Ali's Wedding


Ali's Wedding is a 2017 Australian romantic comedy feature film from Matchbox Pictures. It is directed by Jeffrey Walker and written by Osamah Sami and stars Sami, Helana Sawires, Don Hany and Ryan Corr. Sami has been quoted as saying that the film is "history making, the first Muslim rom-com. This movie will hopefully pave the way for many other similar stories, not just from the Muslim community but from other communities and other minorities in our society." He said that the "affectionate and poignant story of love" was trying to cast a more positive light on Muslim-Australian life.

Plot

Ali, the charming and musically-talented son of an Iraqi Shia cleric, struggles to make the right life choices despite the best of intentions. He wants to be with the girl, Dianne, he loves, but he's been promised to another girl at his father's mosque. He wants to be the great doctor that the community expects him to be, but he doesn't get the marks. Above all, he wants to make his father proud.
To live up to these impossible expectations, he lies about his academic achievements, and then his quest to please his father spirals out of control, with amusing and poignant consequences.

Cast

Release

Ali's Wedding premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2016. It also showed at the Sydney Film Festival on 8 June 2017.

Reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 26 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10, indicating critical acclaim. The website's critics consensus reads: "Ali's Wedding uses its very specific setting to explore universal ideas about relationships -- and in delightfully smart, funny fashion." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Critic of The Hollywood Reporter wrote in his glowing review "Walker's debut mines rapid-fire laughs and bountiful heart from a story of romantic misadventure set in train by a young man desperate to live up to his father's expectations."
In a commendatory review from The Sydney Morning Herald by critic Paul Byrnes, he wrote "It's a genuinely funny, sweetly human Australian comedy about one migrant's story. It needs no excuses: it's almost pitch-perfect for Australian tastes."

Music