Loading ...Palestinian comedy up for Oscar
Oren Liebermann
CNN
A literal minefield in the West Bank would be the perfect setting for a suspense movie or perhaps even a horror or drama. Anything but a comedy.
But that’s exactly where first-time Palestinian film director Basil Khalil sets “Ave Maria,” a comic short about a clash of cultures.
Without giving away too much of the plot, it’s about religious Jewish settlers who crash their car in the West Bank right before the Sabbath.
Nuns have their silence and prayer disrupted when a family of religious Israeli settlers crashes their car into the convent’s wall.
Their only help comes from devout nuns living in an isolated convent — but the nuns have taken a vow of silence.
It’s a complete communications breakdown: Jews who can’t use a phone or electricity on the Sabbath and Christians who can’t speak because of their vow.
“For us, this is hilarious,” says Khalil, “but for them, this is real life, and I wanted to sort of highlight the questioning of rules that we take on ourselves. How necessary are they? Are they really life or death? Or are they absurd?”
Khalil wasn’t trying to make a political statement with his film. There are no Palestinian or Israeli flags.
He is visibly uncomfortable talking about politics.
“The Israel/Palestine conflict? Oh God,” he answered with a nervous laugh when we asked him his thoughts on a solution to the conflict.
‘Need to connect’
He’d rather talk about the people living the conflict.
“They need to connect on a human level,” he says of Israelis and Palestinians. “I’ve got Israeli friends. I’ve got Palestinian friends from all spectrums. And on the human level, we all get along.”
Khalil: “The minute you are born in Israel/Palestine, you are assigned a side.”
It took a couple of years to write the script, he says, explaining that he did not want it be patronizing or poking fun.
But it’s a sensitive subject, he admits: “Somebody is going to be offended somehow.”
Khalil has taken his 15-minute film to 60 film festivals across 30 countries.
He has his sights set even higher. “Ave Maria” is nominated for an Oscar for best short film.
It’s not the first Palestinian film nominated for an Oscar, but it is the first comedy. Director Hani Abu As’ad has had two films nominated for best foreign film: “Paradise Now” in 2005 and “Omar” in 2013. Neither film won.
Laughing at the human condition
“Ave Maria” premiered in Jerusalem one month before the Oscars in a small but crowded independent theater.
Huda al-Imam plays the convent’s mother superior. Cinema, she says, is an important way of laughing at the difficulties of Palestinian life.
“We want to keep our sanity and our humanity despite the fact that we are completely controlled by inhuman elements around us,” al-Imam said at the premiere. “We are still human and we’re still ordinary people and we can still laugh.”
In a region rife with political and religious rules, Khalil says there is value in questioning those rules for a new perspective on an old conflict.
“The minute you are born in Israel/Palestine, you are assigned a side,” he says. “You don’t get to choose if you are born Jewish, Muslim or Christian; but you do get to choose the level of extremism that you will adhere to.”
Source: edition.cnn.com