At first glance, Scandar Copti’s new film, Happy Holidays, appears to go against our collective expectations of Palestinian cinema. It is not about conflict and killings, Nakba and Intifada, the occupation, enforced displacements and loss of home and ethnicity and identity issues. Yet it is about strife and oppression of another kind.
True to his oeuvre, of underscoring the diversity of the Palestinian world, the Palestinian people and their experiences and examining the challenges faced by the Arab community in Israel, Copti focuses on one such family - and their larger social network - in present-day Haifa to bring issues of gender inequality, patriarchy, generational divides and social and cultural dissension to light.
The family drama, which is a Palestine-Germany-France-Italy-Qatar co-production, speaks in both Arabic and Hebrew. It premiered in Venice in September in the Orizzonti section, where it won the Best Screenplay award. It recently bagged the top award, Etoile d’Or, at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival along with two of its actresses - Wafaa Aoun and Manar Shehab - sharing the best actress award.
The film begins in a hospital, in the aftermath of an unforeseen, though minor, car accident, which becomes vital in taking the viewer into the heart of an Arab family in Haifa.
Copti divides the film into four chapters as he tells us stories of the individual members of the family and links them to those in their larger social circle, moving back and forth in time, and examining the same situations from varied perspectives.
While one daughter of the family Leila (Sophie Awaada) is getting married, her siblings - Fifi (Manar Shehab) and Rami (Toufic Danial) - are contending with their own lies and guilts, driving the matriarch of the family, Hanan (Wafaa Aoun), up the wall even as a financial crisis looms large for their father Fouad (Imad Hourani).
Fifi’s secret threatens not just her family’s financial equilibrium with her claim to compensation denied, it also looks set to jeopardise their social reputation and imperil her budding romance with the amiable doctor and family friend Walid (Raed Burbara).
Rami has his own troubles brewing with his girlfriend Shirley (Shani Dahari) refusing to have an abortion. Meanwhile, Shirley’s sister Miri (Meirav Memoresky), a nurse, while trying to discourage Shirley from having the child, has to deal with her own daughter’s depression.
Copti builds the narrative from one everyday family scene to another and portrays relationships on the verge of a breakdown or crisis. The domestic tensions keep growing as the chain of events unfolds at the pace of a thriller.
The interpersonal dynamics don’t just bring the outdated, dogmatic, conservative ways in the Arab society, and their bearing on women, to light, they are also redolent with racial and cultural undertones, the ties that bind and also divide the Arabs and the Jews in a place where they live together than segregated.
There is also a critique of the Israeli military from the point of view of the youth. Essentially it all boils down to critiquing oppressive forces within the family, society and community and making a call for individual freedom and personal choice for the larger liberation in society, community and country.
Aoun and Shehab are wonderful as mother-daughter and deserving of the acting award. However, the rest of the actors are also very finely tuned with each other to give a well-calibrated snapshot of the unique social panorama. It is indeed incredible to know that they are all non-professional actors. What’s more, Memoresky and Burbara, like their on-screen characters, happen to be a nurse and doctor respectively. A case of reel imitating real.