Engrossing movie about the Middle East - if you can suspend some disbelief

The recent French-Canadian film "Incendies" (the incendiaries? those who burn? people on fire?) is a very engrossing film - if, and it may be a big if, you can suspend disbelief and accept a string of unlikelihoods and narrative contrivances that make Girl with the Dragon Tattoo look like an exercise in documentary photorealism. The rather long and complex stories, told in both present tense and interpolated flashback scenes, involves a brother and sister fulfilling requests in mother's will by going back from their Quebec home to unnamed Mideast country (obviously meant to be Lebanon) to find their father, whom they'd believed to be dead, and their brother, whom they'd never known they had. Their search reveals some startling family secrets and also becomes a window through which the film can observe some of the horrors of the civil war in Lebanon and of the religious and cultural strife that has torn apart so many countries in the Middle East. In some ways, the movie is brutally honest - few if any other recent films from outside the U.S. have been so unsparing in depiction of religious violence and terrorism by fundamentalists on both Arab and Christian sides (Jews and Israelis are unmentioned in this film); in another way, it does pull its punches by never really even mentioning Arabs or Muslims - the strife is depicted as Christians versus "nationalists" in some unnamed country - although we can all read through the code. Altogether, though, a very well-paced and compelling movie - and this Notary Public also commends any film that can make not just one but two notaries into heroic figures (very funny dialog about how the whole Middle East struggle would have been obviated if there were notaries back in the days of Moses).