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His new film, “Gaza Munamur” (Gaza Oh My Love), which is screened in the “Horizons” competition at the “Venice Film Festival,” differs little from his early years. His long second film has its characteristics as directors, of course. There is still simplicity and realism, futility and madness with every scene, and dreams like an escape from reality in a city like Gaza. But what is new is the bitter taste, loneliness and sadness despite the humor.
Issa (Salim Dhao) does not know how to reveal his love or seduce Siham (Hiyam Abbas). He is the one who claims to be the “Dongguan” of his time. Today he turns 60. He has nothing in his life but the fish he catches and sells and barely covers his expenses. I feel somewhat sad, with few friends. He’s a little gullible, dervish and humble, free-spirited and passionate. Siham, unlike him: a widow living with her student and her divorced daughter, a seamstress in a small women’s clothing store, lives on little, but is satisfied with her life and hard work, while Issa struggles every day for go hunting and the dangers it brings in Gaza. One day, an original bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo, with a prominent and upright rod, hangs from his net. The statue incites Jesus to flirt with Siham, in a somewhat shameful way. But the statue also brings problems. Now she must hide the treasure from the eyes of relatives and the police, and deal with Siham, society and “Hamas”, in this city where no one can predict what will happen in an hour.
The film’s title is romantic and evident in its tribute to Alain Rene’s masterpiece “Hiroshima … Oh My Love” (1959). Like Hiroshima, the city of war, Gaza, the city we only listen to when it is bombed, is transformed into a very romantic place. The brothers present a very special image of this little universe. Ordinary people are the heroes of work. Signs of death, siege, violence and war are present in the background, in the sounds and colors of the explosions, the sound of radio and television, and the “Hamas” uniform. Although the general idea of the film is “that love can overcome anything and transcend human tragedies”, especially in the last scene, which is unique and different from the entire film, the film maintains its balance. There is room for everything: humor, absurdity, futility, despair and monotony. The brothers managed to avoid the easy emotion or the lament of poverty, war and death as the cradle of true feelings, which made the film move away from the realm of the emotion of pity or excessive poetry. It is a new image of Gaza today from the point of view of the Nasser brothers … Gaza, rising up against the Israelis, as well as against the militancy and the strict rules imposed by “Hamas”. The film is a tribute to difference, condemning the militant community that sees women backwards (her first film was about the same idea, almost the same, but presented it in a more prominent way).
The brothers avoided the easy emotion or the laments of poverty, war and death.
The film carries a lot of laughs, not jokes, but absurd moments like the “chaste” women that the sister brings her brother to marry, the nudity of the statue in a city prohibiting nudity, the symbolism of the erect penis of Jesus, and also the symbolism of the authorities’ search for him after his separation from the statue. He mixes ordinary brothers with the absurd, the sweet and the bitter in a film that seeks love in nothingness, poetry in uncertainty, about life even if nothing remains of it, about the true simplicity of the human soul, about the Simpler wishes that are the most important. The film is not a masterpiece, nor a great cinematographic work, but it is sincere, noble, loving and transparent, full of gestures and thousands of little things that make up what we call life.
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