Palestinian cinema has become dominated by big-budget co-productions. That’s hardly surprising for a community with empty pockets and literal roadblocks everywhere.
And while recent titles such as Najwa Najjar's Eyes of a Thief and Hany Abu-Assad's Academy Award-nominated Omar have introduced wider global audiences to Palestinian filmmakers, the thematic result can stifle scripts that veer from the suicide-bomber/Israel Defense Forces-thug trope.
This is one reason why Muayad Alayan was happy for finance to take a back seat during the making of Love, Theft and Other Entanglements, his first feature, which premiered at the Berlinale film festival last week. The film eschews hyperbolic narratives for a personal, comic examination of the ordinary people stuck on either side of Palestine's many checkpoints.
Shot in Jean-Luc Godard-esque black and white, Love, Theft... looks more Left Bank than West Bank in style. And that's just fine for a production that feels, in a good way, every part the guerrilla, indie-art form its director set out to make – the whole thing was shot on a US$20,000 (Dh73,400) Indiegogo budget.
The Jerusalem-based Alayan wrote, co-directed and co-produced the film, while his brother Rami, who lives in San Francisco, co-produced, art-directed and even appeared on-screen as a falafel seller. None of the crew were paid, which may have caused concern when they moonlighted as militiamen using authentic Palestinian police machine guns.
Minimal payments were made to the cast, which includes the Jordanian lead Sami Metwasi, who gives an excellent performance as Mousa, a car thief whose attempt to bribe his way to Europe is crushed when it turns out that a vehicle he steals has Israeli soldier Avi (Riyad Sliman) in the trunk.
Mousa’s roguish charm shines in another entanglement – with Manal (Maya Abu Al Hayyat), a married woman whose rich husband is unaware that his daughter is really Mousa’s child.
But the key to the film is the mirror held up between Mousa, the loveable thief, and Avi, a soldier who would really rather be anywhere other than tied up – quite literally – in an unwinnable war.
“After all these years, when I see the soldiers I know who’s the [person] who wants to make my day hell and harass me just because he has prejudice,” he says. “And I see the soldier who’s feeling bad, and he’d rather just be with his family, his lover, or off in Thailand.”
Foreign co-productions can be great, says Alayan – who made his first short film, Lesh Sabreen?, in 2009 at the age of 22 – as they have allowed Palestinians to make films the whole world will see.
But they can also lead to a dilution of the creative process and, with it, a local web of narratives that goes much deeper than machine guns and suicide vests.
“This [foreign] involvement within the script often leaves you with the images everyone expects out of Palestine – where is the war? Where is the checkpoint? – and suddenly the script is far from where you started,” says Alayan.
With Love, Theft... Alayan hopes to get audiences laughing and crying. Its Berlin debut, at which all of the screenings sold out, did just that – in places. Some jokes fall short of full-on laughs and many of the local references will be lost on foreign audiences, but this film is an exciting departure from Palestine's recent cinematic history.
Alayan might hope his next project enjoys a bigger budget – using cigarette-lighter pistols and filming at friends’ houses can only be done so many times – but for now, he and his brother are basking in the rightful attention that such an original, well-shot and character-driven Palestinian dramedy should be getting.
artslife@thenational.ae
