When the world woke up to the horrific violence the Israeli occupation visited on Gaza last week, nearly all cultural events were postponed. I was planning to leave to attend El Gouna Film Festival, which was to open last Friday, but due to the conflict, will now take place between 27 October and 2 November. After following the horrific news for a few days I thought Palestinian films might be a less painful way of engaging with events. I remembered that I owned a copy of acclaimed Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s 2019 film It Must Be Heaven, which I had been saving for a special occasion. Suleiman appears as himself, the nearly mute witness of the absurdities of life in Palestine and beyond, in Paris and New York where, seeking funding for a new film, he is told it is not Palestinian enough.

Afterwards I was in the mood for more Suleiman so I decided to see his classic 2002 film  Divine Intervention one more time. It is a surreal black comedy that depicts the madness of daily life for Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation in Jerusalem. It consists of a series of brief, interconnected sketches, which stand as a record of a day in the life of a Palestinian living in Nazareth, whose girlfriend lives several checkpoints away in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Suleiman plays the lead, a man trying to communicate with his girlfriend by, among other methods, signalling to her from his rooftop. The film doesn’t have much dialogue in its entire 92-minute duration, but it delivers its political message through metaphors communicated in a powerful visual language. In this way it deals with such themes as restricted movement, oppressive surveillance, discrimination and intimidation.

The film’s master scene as I see it is when a Palestinian woman in sunglasses just walks through the checkpoint, managing to paralyse the soldiers on duty who would otherwise have shot her by sheer force of cool. The film conveys not only a profound sense of how Palestinians are dehumanised but also how their humanity triumphs against the odds.

Palestinian cinema is young compared to Arab cinema in general, the first Palestinian film being a silent 20-minute documentary on King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia’s visit to Palestine in 1935, directed by Ibrahim Hassan Serhan who followed the king around during his visit. In 1948, during the Nakba and all the devastating effect it had on Palestinians, the film industry too was negatively impacted. Filmmakers were forced to resume their work in neighbouring countries, with Serhan for example participating in the first Jordanian feature film The Struggle in Jarash (1957) and another Palestinian filmmaker, Abdallah Kaawash, directing the second Jordanian feature film My Homeland, My Love (1964). 

From this point on Palestinian cinema was interwoven with the political and social realities of Palestinian history: the Israeli occupation that varies in their films from daily atrocities to the bigger, historical picture. Palestinian cinema emerged from this point as a form of cultural expression and resistance and served as a powerful tool to illustrate Palestinian stories. Mustafa Abu Ali, who co-founded the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973, made Return to Haifa (1982), based on a short novel by Ghassan Kanafani. Starting in the 1990s, a new wave of Palestinian films took the world by storm. Suleiman’s debut, Chronicles of a Disappearance (1996), became the first Palestinian film to receive international acclaim, winning various awards from world festivals. Michel Khleifi, Rashid Mashharawi, Ali Nassar, Hany Abu-Assad, Najwa Najjar all made significant contributions.

Najjar’s debut feature, Al-Mor wal Rumman (Pomegranates and Myrh, 2008), starring Ashraf Farah, Ali Suliman and Hiam Abbas, is about a Palestinian dancer who becomes the wife of a prisoner. The film won a number of international awards. Likewise Between Heaven and Earth (2019), the story of a Palestinian couple who decide to divorce after a five-year marriage and the complications they face to obtain the documents from an Israeli court. The film won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Best Screenplay at Cairo International Film Festival. There is also Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), also starring Ali Suliman, about two childhood friends who are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

In 2020, the delicate drama by Palestinian twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser Gaza mon amour marked a move away from the aforementioned new wave. The film evokes the horrors of the occupation from raids to conflicts, and how the Palestinians are forced to live on unjust Israeli terms. It revolves around the couple Issa (Salim Daw), a 60-year-old fisherman, and Siham (Hiam Abbas), a widow living with her divorced daughter Leila (Maisa Abd Elhadi), both seamstresses at a women’s clothing store in the market where Issa heads to sell his fish. 

On one hand, Issa has to show his work permit every night to the authorities so that he can sail out to ply his trade. Ironically enough, one night his net catches a life-size statue standing up. He takes it home and hides it after he covers its genitals, wondering whether it is a priceless treasure. It will become a source of headache and confusion in relation to the authorities.  On the other hand, Siham is shocked by the news that the owner of the store wants to cut down her salary, due to inflation, so she wants to make a fresh start at the local university. Issa secretly admires Siham and is constantly plucking up the courage to approach her in any way. On the other hand his young sister Manal (Manal Awad) is trying her best to choose a wife for him from their neighbourhood.

Directors and screenwriters Tarzan and Arab Nasser successfully achieve a fine balance between subtle humour and the tragic story of Gaza through their two protagonists. Siham, however, does not become aware of Issa’s interest until he decides to follow her into the market. Since they take the same vehicle, Issa tries to initiate some kind of conversation with her on the way. Desperate for an excuse to interact with her, he heads to her store, taking all his trousers and asking her to make them a little shorter even though they fit him perfectly. At first she says this is a woman-only store but then she relents and he ends up wearing trousers that are too short for him. Nevertheless, Siham’s mind is elsewhere. She is thinking of her daughter’s future and hoping she will find a new husband or pursue a career to secure her a reasonable living. 

The screenplay, together with brilliant directing, highlights the details of life in the city of Gaza, showing how hard it can be through the smallest details like pictures of late relatives on walls or how television reflects a cramped landscape: bleak news, old movies, or foreign soap operas. The character of Issa is brilliantly constructed. He has a special sense of humour without knowing it. His actions especially after he discovers the statue and hides it in his room and his naïve comments about it and how he questions himself, whether he is old fashioned. He smokes and cooks his fish in a primitive yet delicious way. All this gives the film a special flavour. The film has two sides: its realism is balanced by absurdism, combining a delicate portrait of the little things that give life meaning with those characters in the city who appreciate it, the daily hardships they face and how this love story between two relatively old people, though powerful, is turns out to be impossible in the end.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 October, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly