Edward Said Documentary Premieres at 64th New York Film Festival

Maiken Baird's documentary "Edward Said: Between Worlds" premiered this week at the 64th New York Film Festival, tracing the Palestinian-American scholar from his 1935 birth in Jerusalem to his 2003 death.

The Film Stage calls the film "a concise primer on one of the most consequential academic thinkers of the late 20th century." It leans on family 8mm home movies — footage only Baird's team could access, thanks to a long friendship with the family.

Two interview recordings anchor the picture: a 1986 televised discussion with Salman Rushdie, and a lengthier 2002 conversation later released as "Edward Said: The Last Interview." Baird produced the Oscar-winning "Icarus" and directed "Venus and Serena." She keeps her own narration minimal.

What does the film actually cover?

Said's 1999 memoir Out of Place anchors the early chapters. His father ran an office-supply business across the region, with British colonial administrators among the major clients. The privileged setup doesn't track toward political militancy.

Said attended Victoria School in Alexandria — nicknamed then the "Eton of the Middle East" — then a Massachusetts boarding school, then Princeton. He trained proficiently in classical piano. He shelved a Palestinian identity until 1967's Six-Day War shook him, just as he started teaching at Columbia.

Beirut became his political base in the 1970s. He reconnected with his mother there and met PLO leaders at their headquarters. Two 1978 books cemented his reputation: Orientalism, which identified distortions in Western scholarship on the Middle East, and The Question of Palestine, which sketched an origin myth for Palestinian statehood.

Where does the film fall short?

The Film Stage argues Baird ducks the hard part: "Said is respected as a media pundit but revered as a thinker, and the film steps back from probing this." The review adds that the film avoids "the textual thickets of Orientalism, which is staggering in its erudition."

That omission registers at a festival running while Gaza dominates the news cycle. The reviewer compares the missed ambition to John Berger's Ways of Seeing or Mariano Llinás's recent Life of Jorge Luis Borges — both works that treated their intellectual subjects with full weight.

What does this change for Said on film?

Said died before the War on Terror and the Second Intifada escalated. The review notes that being "so ahead of his time has made today's most trenchant commentators — on the Israeli and Jewish side, also — true followers in his wake." A documentary willing to engage his ideas, not just his biography, would land differently now.

Baird's primer functions as entry-level context. Useful, but the fully realized Said documentary — one that matches Orientalism's scholarly ambition — remains unwritten.