'The Burdened' - Kithchen Sink Drama Lives! A Film Review

It is rare to see a film set in Yemen, a country that is new to film making. It is rarer still in 2026 to see a kitchen sink drama. 'The Burdened' (2023) is both of these things, and more besides. It was co-scripted and directed by Amr Gamal, and was his second film and only the second film to be made in Yemen. I watched without doing any prior reading about the film, or the country that I expected it be set in. That the film script, co-written by writer Amr Gamal, was rooted in the theatre was obvious from the first scene onward. 

The film focused on one family, a mother, father, and three chidren all well under ten years old, living a hand to mouth life in the city port of Aden, which as I read after was until 1967 British, and like many cast offs of the British Empire was left to fend for itself in a very uncertain post empire world. In the last decade or more uncertainty turned to civil war. The effects of the war were there to be seen in the footage of the streets of Aden, where there was very little rubble but the place looked like mny bombs had hit it, and there was not the money to fully repair buildings. The script was terrific and made a virtue of its theare roots and minimal resources to craft a tight story where desperation fought decency, and wanting to do what was approved involved conflict. 

I lost count of the number of times when two characters met one would say to the other 'As-salamu alaykum', 'Peace be upon you' where the reply was 'Wa alaykum as-salam', 'And upon you be peace'. Those two phrases were the most used words used in the 91 minutes of the film, to the point where I wondered if there was some private intonation of the two rsponces in the film where, different intonations conveyed more private meanngs between the women who used both phrases. But the fact that the women where the majority of the characters and greeted each other so often with those two phrases pushed the film far further than I would have expected into it passing the Bechdel Test. The indications of the taboo with women's dress was also made clearer with, depending on the company, the women wore veils that were detatchable in an instant.

The core of the film was a family trying to get by an economy where the government does not pay its own workers the wages they are due for months after the wages were due. And yes, just as talk of illegal abortion was the sure fire way to spice up a BBC kitchen sink drama in the plays it broadcast in black and white in the 1960s, so the same rule of drama follows here. The real delight was in seeing not a second of the camera framing or the script wasted, as the characters explore disaster after disaster narrowly avoided. 

The film ends on an uncertain note of hope.