When I Saw You
Neutral, steady, measured drama / political, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Tarek and his mother Ghaydaa number among the tens of thousands of refugees crossing the border from Palestine, having been separated from Tarek's father amidst the chaos of the Six Day War. They ultimately settle at the Harir refugee camp, a makeshift home for a new generation displaced by conflict. Tarek dreams of being reunited with his father, and struggles to adapt to a new life far away from all he previously knew.
Our read · When I Saw You (2012) reads as a neutral, steady, grounded drama · political · childhood entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of When I Saw You
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a quiet, poetic Palestinian story of a boy and mother in a refugee camp after the Six Day War.”
Skip it tonight — You want excitement, fast pacing or have no interest in displacement and quiet resilience stories.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself