Scandar Copti on Finding Love Across the Israeli/Palestinian Divide

Scandar Copti doesn’t like polemics. In his Oscar-nominated debut Ajami (2009), Copti, a Palestinian director and Israeli citizen, avoided easy answers, and obvious finger-pointing, to tell a story of crime and corruption, family belonging, and political divisions set in his hometown of Jaffa, a mostly Arab city just south of Tel Aviv. Co-directed with Jewish Israeli filmmaker Yaron Shani, the movie paints a subtle picture of a society split along fissures religious, political, cultural, and economic, without ever chiding his characters or dipping into mawkish sentimentality.

Copti’s solo follow-up, Happy Holidays, is a similar complex, non-judgemental, portrait of modern Israel.

Indie Sales is handling world sales on the movie, which premiered in the Orrizonti sidebar of the Venice Film Festival and had its North American bow in Toronto.

The film follows several interlocking stories of women, mostly Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Christians, brought together by a fateful car accident.

When Fifi (Manar Shehab) is hospitalized following a car crash after a night clubbing (on the Jewish holiday Purim), her ER visit sends ripples through her family and beyond. Fifi’s brother Rami finds out his Jewish girlfriend Shirley (Shani Dahari) is pregnant and refuses to terminate the pregnancy, despite opposition from both the father and her sister, Miri (Merav Mamorsky). Fifi’s parents, Fouad and Hanan (Imad Hourani, Wafaa Aoun) are struggling with financial issues while trying to plan the wedding of Fifi’s older sister Leila (Sophie Awaad). Meanwhile, Fifi starts up a relationship with Rami’s charming but conservative friend Walid (Raed Burbara). These very personal stories are tied in, in subtle but unmistakable ways, with the political realities of life in a heavily militarized and divided nation where unquestioned patriarchal rules dictate the choices and options the characters think they have.

Scandar Copti spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the origins of the film in his early childhood, why he refuses to “preach to the choir” with polemical stories, and why the events of Oct. 7, and the ongoing war in Gaza, have made him “more determined” to use empathy and love to understand the other side.

What was the initial starting point for this film? Where did the original idea come from?

I think it began a very long time ago, when I was a teenager. I was very much interested in logic and math. I’m a trained engineer, by the way, I never studied film. I was very interested in logic. And I overheard a family member of mine, a female family member, telling her own son: ‘Don’t ever let a woman tell you what to do!’ referring to his wife. But she was a woman! I thought: ‘This is a paradox! I’ve discovered a paradox!’ That moment stayed with me. Later on, I understood that she must have internalized her own oppression so much that she was convinced that this was the right way to go, to pass it on. Later, when I went to university, studying engineering at an Israeli University, I saw that the same thing was happening with Israeli society when it comes to rationalizing and internalizing the oppression of others, with the occupation and militarization in general. It’s just not questioned whether you go to the army or not just as it’s not questioned that women should accept the rule of men.

That was the start of it. But back then, I didn’t have anything to do with filmmaking. I started acting and writing skits, funny skits for the theater. And I totally forgot about it. It wasn’t until years later that it came back up in me and I felt I needed to do something about it. I’m a listener and a lot of people, a lot of women, told me their stories. At one point, I said: ‘Okay, I have enough material to work with.’ And I started writing. But the real motivation could be a midlife crisis, me looking back and going: ‘What went wrong with me?’ Why am I the way I am? I have my career. I’m a teacher. I have a beautiful family, and two beautiful kids. But there’s something that is not quite right. If you start digging into it, with yourself or with the help of others, and then you realize that it had to do with this idea that things must work in a specific, pre-designed way, which didn’t fit me. And it goes back to how women are treated in my society, how people construct their reality.

In my life, I’ve dealt with a lot of conflicts, political and cultural conflicts, but they have been conflicts with people that I love, on all sides, and I couldn’t hate them for “being bad.” I had to investigate why they are the way they are, and I think this is what I did in my film. I’m trying to investigate where all these problems are coming from.

It’s interesting you say that because this film isn’t as overtly political, or polemic, as many I’ve seen set in the region from Israeli or Palestinian directors, which are often told from one side or the other. Your movie seems to be trying to tell the story from right in the middle of things, from this tight little community of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who all live almost on top of one another in a very small geographical region.

All my work starts with me being annoyed. I get annoyed by something, pissed off, and I trace it back to the origin. So someone annoys me, and I hate this person. I think: ‘What an asshole.’ But then I say: Okay, take a deep breath. It’s not this person. This person is not what you see on the outside. This person is the outcome of a whole reality of past experiences, good and bad, that were basically imposed on this person. This member of my family, this female member of my family, isn’t cuckoo, she’s isn’t crazy because she says something like this to her son. No, it’s the life, the social, cultural construction that she’s gone through, that led her to behave in this way.

This is how I see conflicts in the film. I show you two characters, Walid and Fifi, and you love both of them. He’s such an amazing, charismatic, person, you cannot hate him. And so is she. I do that intentionally, make the audience fall in love with both of them, just like it has been my whole life, where I love these people and then realize that something is off.

But in the film, I try to explain why is this happening. I show the process, whether in this story or in another connected story, how this reality construction takes place, and what leads to. No spoilers, but the horrible thing that happen are only the outcomes of the indoctrination that people go through. But you cannot hate those people. You have empathy towards them because they’re suffering as well.

You have strong male characters too but every chapter is told from the perspective of one of the female, characters. Why did you make them the center of all these separate stories?

Because that was the origin of my annoyance. My life is the way it is because of the women in my life. There is this hierarchy, and there are these power dynamics of privilege from me telling this story as a man, but I always own this story, because it affects me personally, as it will affect the next female and male generations. It is a story told from the female perspective, but everybody’s suffering because of patriarchy. The men in our story are also suffering. Do you think what happens to Walid in the end is good for him? Of course not.

The arguments over who is allowed to tell which stories are used in various contexts, but given the political turmoil in Israel and Palestine, I imagine the issue must be even more front and center. This is an uncomfortable question for me to be even asking, because I know you are an Israeli citizen, but how do you identify yourself? As Palestinian, as Israeli?

I’m a Palestinian, obviously, because this is my identity. It’s difficult to identify myself as a full citizen of Israel, because I’m not. I don’t have the same rights. There are 52 laws that work against me as a Palestinian. So, yeah, I define myself as a Palestinian. But I don’t care about religion. I don’t define myself through religion because I don’t think it affects me. And you basically define yourself based on what made you suffer. If being Palestinian didn’t make me suffer, I’ll just define myself as a father. Because being a father also makes me suffer (laughs).

I have two kids. I can relate.

But if you ask someone who has a perfect life, they will talk about defining themselves through suffering for their football team, or the national team, or whatever, they’ll choose a different definition. It’s the same with my movies, my work comes from this suffering. But it’s a good suffering. It’s a good thing.

Happy Holidays isn’t the story of the bombing of Gaza, the story of colonization, or the story of the direct oppression of Palestinians. Even the way you show the quiet indoctrination of Israeli children into the militarized state is quite subtle and delicate. Why did you avoid direct political confrontation in this film?

I think mainly because I care about my audiences. I have specific people in my mind that I write for, and these are people that are close to me. But I want to prove them wrong. I want to spark new thoughts in their mind. I love them. Never in history has telling someone to change their behavior ever worked. It never happens. I wish you could go to a therapist and he’d tell you: ‘Just be happy. Stop being depressed.’ But that doesn’t work.

I don’t want to confront people head-on with facts, or even worse, take sides, and present the “good” and the “bad”. That would be like making a Rambo movie, but imagining Stallone as an Afghani. I’m not doing my films to preach to the choir. That’s not the work of an artist. I’m here on a mission to, through empathy and love, to show us, us human beings, that we’re okay. We are good, we’re okay, but we are trapped in a corrupt moral system that convinced us that this thing is right and this thing is wrong. That’s what we have to rethink. People are seeing what is happening. There is live streaming from Gaza right now and nobody cares. Nobody cares because their mind is programmed already to think in one direction.

This is my way, not only of making films, but really to go through life, to be empathetic. I teach it in my scriptwriting classes. I tell my students, think of these two cases: You need an extension for an assignment and you say to me ‘My dog ate my assignment, he peed on my laptop, I have COVID, whatever.’ Or you come and tell me a story: ‘I lived with my grandmother most of my life. She took care of me when my parents neglected me, and I owe everything to her. She’s not feeling well, I need to be with her. Will you give me an extension?’ The second approach works much better. That’s what I’m trying to do in my writing.

Your film shows how many similar structures, patriarchal structures, influence both Palestinian and Israeli society. Do you see direct parallels between the two cultures? Because when you jump from story to story, from woman to woman, from the Israeli to the Palestinian side, the connections between these women’s lives seem very close, like the opposite sides of a mirror.

Well, I think that’s the case for human beings in general. We all go through the same things. This is why cinema works. We all suffer from the same things. In the end, we die and we don’t understand the meaning of our lives. In between we care about the people we love and we have ideas about how to make them happier. Both [Fifi’s sister and mother] Miri and Hanan, have clear ideas of how to make the other women in their life happier. They think they are making the right choices. But they don’t imagine that women can make these choices for themselves, that Fifi could choose her own path to happiness.

It’s really universal. I think this film works because you could watch it dub into whatever language you choose and it will work. I could delete the stuff that makes it specific to one place, the Israeli flags or whatever, and it could take place anywhere in the world. Because everywhere the traditions and values and morality are prescribed that shape society. These are not things that we’re born with. It is how we are raised. My morality is different than yours because I grew up differently. But we all can change.

As you take this film around to festivals, showing it to various audiences around the world, are you worried that audiences will come with preconceived ideas of what a “Palestinian director” has to say about Israel?

It’s the curse and the blessing of being what I am. Being a Palestinian in Israel, it’s like having a scar on my hand. The scar is who I am. It has a story. It has a history. I bring this scar with me wherever I go. I have to face that. I’m not making films to please everybody. I’m not a pop artist. I’m not thinking about maximum box office. I’m thinking about my community of Israels and Palestinians and about trying to provoke them to think. With audiences and Q&As, even if I get annoyed by a question, I take a deep breath and think: ‘Where’s this person coming from?’ Like when I think about where my characters are coming from, what was their indoctrination? And I try, with a lot of compassion, to answer the question and see if I can change their perspective. With my first film, Ajami, I had some horrible Q&As. It was like: ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ But a nasty question, an angry question, is always better than having two people sleeping in the crowd in the first row of the theater. Which happened to me! Two people snoring in their seats! I was like: ‘Why did you come to this film?’ It’s better to have weird questions than have two people snoring in your films.

It’s better to make your audience angry than bored.

Right, because if they are angry, at least you know the film had an impact on them. Anger, for me at least, makes me think. For some people, it makes them act. But if you slow them down in their response, maybe they will think.

Has your mission of empathy become more challenging since October 7 and the war in Gaza?

No it’s only made me more determined. I’m an optimistic person. Yes, I get those moments where I’m down, but I look back at history. There were 800 years of English occupation of Ireland. 800 years. But it ended. I look at 400 years of slavery. It ended eventually. I believe in the good of humans but we need a push. We need people to tell us to listen, and to think again. I’m very optimistic about the discussions I have, like the discussion I had this morning with my friend, an Israeli producer. She’s sharing with me the difficulties that she’s having in her own society, that she’s looked at as a traitor [for telling Palestinian stories] although she herself lost a nephew in this war. But she still believes people from both sides can live together and should live together. These conversations fill me up with a lot of hope. I know it’s difficult. But it’s like with your kids. You said you’re a father too. Sometimes, with kids, you almost want to kill yourself, but you go: These are my kids, this is the life I’m living. And this is my society. I’m part of it. I need to make it better.