Culture & Arts
Alayan and Hassouna take two Palestinian films to Venice this week
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opens on Wednesday with two Palestinian films in its official selection, one of them a Jerusalem story that has been fifteen years in its director's head and the other filmed in northern Gaza by a photographer who kept working.
The festival runs to 12 September, when its awards are announced.
A father, a court order and a son who may have drowned#
Muayad Alayan returns to Venice with "Conversation With the Sea" — «حوار مع البحر» — which premieres in the Venezia Spotlight section on 7 September.
The film is set in Jerusalem and follows Kamal, a Palestinian man of sixty ordered by an Israeli court to settle a social security debt attributed to his son. The son is believed to have drowned in the Red Sea decades earlier. Because no official record of that death exists, the debt stands, and the father sets out to find out what happened to his own child.
Alayan is from Beit Safafa and has built his career on exactly this register — the bureaucratic absurdity that turns a private grief into a file. It is his third feature to reach a major festival after "The Reports on Sarah and Saleem" and "A House in Jerusalem", and the return to the Lido is not a debut but a homecoming.
The photographer who stayed#
"Citizen Osama" — «المواطن أسامة» — by Ahmed Hassouna screens out of competition. The France–Palestine documentary follows an artistic photographer in northern Gaza who became a documentarian of the war, recording the destruction around him while trying to keep his wife and newborn child alive.
It is the harder film to describe without diminishing it. What Hassouna has, and what almost nobody else has, is the interior of a working photographer's year: the decisions about what to point a camera at when the subject is your own street.
The festival around them#
Palestine is also the subject of the argument surrounding this year's edition rather than only of the films inside it.
More than two hundred filmmakers and performers, among them Alia Shawkat and Guy Pearce, signed an open letter titled "Yet Gaza Continues to Burn" asking the festival to take a clearer position; the organisers subsequently cancelled the jury press conference.
The main competition includes "Naza", the only documentary running for the Golden Lion, directed by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of "No Other Land" and produced with The Guardian.
That is the shape of a Palestinian September on the Lido: two Palestinian directors with their own films, one Israeli-made documentary in the main race, and a festival being asked what it intends to say.
The work that will outlast the argument is the work with the Palestinian names on it. Alayan's premiere is on the seventh; Hassouna's screens out of competition; the prizes are read out on the twelfth.
