The outspoken Israeli comedian Naomi Shuster-Eliassi struggles to find humour, hope and humanity in her homeland’s current war-torn, fiercely polarised state in this bold, enjoyably irreverent documentary from director Amber Fares. Coexistence, My Ass! walks an uneasy high wire between comedy and tragedy, with a few tonal wobbles along the way, but Eliassi is consistently engaging company, the overall story compelling, and the subject matter still depressingly urgent.
Fares previously made a short profile documentary about Eliassi, Reckoning With Laughter (2019), for Al-Jazeera. But this full-length feature is a much more ambitious and emotionally spiky affair, exploring the fraught question of how left-leaning artists and peace activists deal with the horrors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza. There are no easy solutions here, but plenty of food for thought, and some cautiously optimistic glimmers. After a prize-winning festival run, this extremely timely film makes its Dutch premiere at IDFA this week, and seems sure find a wider audience on big or small screen,
Calling herself a “poster child of coexistence”, Eliassi was born in Israel to an Iranian-Jewish mother and a Romanian-Jewish father whose parents fled the Holocaust, “woke progressive leftists” with a simple belief in equality between Israelis and Palestinians. She spent her childhood in Neve Shalom, aka Wahat as-Salam, which translates as “Oasis of Peace”, a culturally mixed cooperative community midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Farsi and English, her long-time best friend from school is an Arab woman, Ranin. The duo even became part of the village’s official welcoming committee for famous visitors like Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton and the Dalai Lama,
A peace activist since her teens, Eliassi worked at the UN before turning to comedy full time. Fares is on hand when she lands a fellowship at Harvard University in 2019, where she starts work on a one-woman stand-up show about Israeli-Palestinian relations, which she delivers in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Edgy material about terrorism and occupation sit alongside more familiar Jewish-themed jokes about food, family and the pressure to get married, not always comfortably.
Politically, Eliassi is already losing faith in Israel’s complacent liberal centrists before the October 7 attacks, joining angry protest marches against Netanyahu’s “fascist” policies and sharing robust but cordial debates with more conservative speakers on TV. Her attacks on “normies” who “want democracy for Jews only” earn her plenty of enemies, as does her satirical TV spoof song “Dubai, Dubai”, which criticises the indifference of other Arab states towards Palestinian suffering. Even so, she mostly relishes these clashes, disarming her critics with self-effacing humour and snappy comebacks.
But the Hamas massacres and their aftermath inevitably shatter Eliassi’s brand of progressive idealism. After the attacks, Fares shoots her sobbing, despairing and numb. Some of her own friends are killed on October 7. “It’s impossible to grieve for so any people we know”, she says. Meanwhile, she sees loved ones and family members turn vengeful and bitter, abandoning the compassion they would once have felt for innocent Palestinian victims in the Gaza war zone. Jonathan Silver, the son of murdered peace activist Vivian Silver, proves sympathetic to her case. But others call her a traitor and an enemy, “you hate your own people”.
Coexistence, My Ass! concludes with as much sunshine as it can muster, revealing positive developments for Eliassi in both her career and personal life. She is back onstage with a revamped version of her stand-up show, but her jokes have taken on a harder edge, much like her political statements. “The elephant in the room used to be the occupation,” she explains. “Now the elephant the room is genocide”. Not exactly a happy ending, but not hopeless either, an inspirational example of how terrible events can still provoke warm-hearted humour and a rare, fragile but courageous empathy.
Director: Amber Fares
Screenwriters: Rachel Leah Jones, Rabab Haj Yahya
Cinematography: Amber Fares, Philippe Bellaïche, Amit Chachamov
Editing: Rabab Haj Yahya
Music: William Ryan Fritch
Producers: Amber Fares, Rachel Leah Jones, Valérie Montmartin
Production companies: My Teez Production (US), Home Made Docs (Isreal)
World sales: Autolook, Vienna
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
In English, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi
95 minutes
