Let It Be Morning: Palestinians in Israel Caught in the Middle
Eran Kolirin discusses Palestinian identity, his cast’s refusal to represent Israel and the siege at the heart of Let It Be Morning.
In 2014, Bethlehem represented Israel in the Oscar competition for best foreign-language film, later renamed best international feature. The film revolves around Israeli intelligence entangling Palestinians in social and economic problems and forcing them to cooperate in order to infiltrate Palestinian resistance groups.
Ironically, a Palestinian film, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, which dealt with the same subject, was representing Palestine in the Oscar competition that year.
Unlike Omar, which had no budget for an Oscar campaign, Bethlehem received support from the Israeli government, which paid for its crew and actors to travel to Hollywood, while its consulate organised promotional parties to which I was invited. I went to meet the Palestinian members of its team, the actors and screenwriter Ali Waked, who told me there that he was promoting Omar, not Bethlehem. “Please tell your colleagues not to vote for us,” he added before I left the party. And indeed, Bethlehem failed, while Omar secured an Oscar nomination.
In 2010, when Ajami represented Israel, its Palestinian co-director, Scandar Copti, angered the Israeli government when he declared at a Hollywood panel, after the film’s Oscar nomination, that he refused to represent a state that did not represent him.
Yet this year Israel is represented in the Oscar competition by Let It Be Morning, adapted from a Palestinian novel by the Palestinian author Sayed Kashua and starring Palestinian actors. They used the platform of the Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars, which they dominated, to denounce their government’s racist policies towards them inside the Green Line and the crimes against humanity it commits against their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They also refused to travel to Hollywood to promote the film’s Oscar campaign. Only its Israeli director, Eran Kolirin, came.
“It is very complicated,” Kolirin told me when I met him in Hollywood. “But we made the film together and coordinated all the reactions you are seeing together. I would have preferred them to come and use this platform to draw attention to the issues the film raises. I am doing that alone now.”
Let It Be Morning centres on Sami, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who lives in Jerusalem and works in technology. He travels with his wife and son to his family’s village inside the Green Line to celebrate his brother’s wedding, and becomes trapped there after the Israeli army imposes a siege to arrest Palestinians from the West Bank hiding in the village. Conflict erupts among the villagers over how to deal with the siege and over their national identity.
“This is a film about a community caught in the middle,” Kolirin says. “The Palestinians of 1948, who hold Israeli identity cards, are caught between Israeli forces pressing them on one side and their loyalty to the Palestinians of 1967, who suffer under a terrible military regime. The questions facing the characters are: Who am I? And how am I represented?”
The struggle over identity
The Palestinian members of the film’s team, all of them Palestinians of 1948, answered that question clearly and without hesitation. When the film was entered in the Un Certain Regard competition at the most recent Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli film, they refused to attend its screening and issued a statement denouncing Israel’s racist practices towards them and its oppressive occupation of their people, accusing it of erasing their identity.
“I agree with them,” Kolirin says. “Israel has turned the term ‘Israeli’ into a tool for erasing Palestinian identity by passing many laws. Personally, I do not care whether the film’s identity is Palestinian or Israeli. People have an identity, not films. But Israel insists on giving the film an identity in order to erase someone else’s existence.”
An Israeli identity was imposed on the film after the Israeli government, during its production, passed a law requiring every film receiving government funding to be classified as Israeli. “The film received funding from France, but the French did not demand that it be classified as French,” Kolirin protests. “The real reason for this law is to force Palestinian directors to define themselves as Israelis, and that is what we oppose.”
Kolirin tried to persuade his actors to come to Cannes and use its international platform to protest against that Israeli law, but they refused. He became their voice in the international media, promoting their cause and criticising his government’s practices towards them. He also published their statement on his Facebook page.
“I think this is real politics,” Kolirin comments. “Not avoiding the questions and thinking you are above them, but being inside the questions and trying to answer them in a way that has a political impact. I am extremely proud of the way things have gone so far.”
Of course, the film’s perspective and Kolirin’s political positions do not represent Israeli public opinion or his government’s propaganda. They contradict them entirely, which has prompted reservations among pro-Israel lobbies in the United States about the choice of the film to represent Israel in the Oscar competition.
“The film was chosen by the Israeli film academy,” Kolirin replies. “That is 400 people, most of them artists, who believe that the perspective of the Palestinian minority, 20 per cent of the country’s citizens, should be presented to the world. The financial support the film received from the Israeli government is not a donation. This is tax money paid by its Palestinian audience. Twenty per cent of the Israeli cinema budget is Palestinian money. Does it not make sense to finance Palestinian films with this money so that they can present the Palestinian perspective and narrative to the world?”
But Israeli audiences rejected the film’s narrative and treated it as fiction, believing that their army does not impose sieges on its own citizens or shoot them. Yet from the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 until 1960, it subjected its Palestinian citizens to military rule, and its security forces killed dozens of them. These included 49 victims in the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1965, seven in the Land Day demonstrations in 1976 and 13 at the beginning of the second intifada in 2000.
Exposing apartheid from within Israel
“They speak as though they were living on another planet, because these things are still happening today,” Kolirin exclaims in disbelief. “There is a major problem with disseminating information and telling stories, and that is why I think this film is very important for both Jewish and Israeli audiences. It presents the real situation and the continuing reality of discrimination and apartheid, which the majority denies. We have to resist in order to tell these stories.”
Kolirin uses satire in his approach to the film, recalling Palestinian cinema, which often relies on absurdist comedy in its storytelling and its portrayal of Palestinian reality. He used the same approach in his celebrated 2007 film The Band’s Visit, telling the story of an Egyptian orchestra that arrives in Israel to perform in a city near Tel Aviv. Its members misread the address and end up in a remote town in the Negev desert.
“Absurdist cinema is often used to portray the reality of a minority, or of one person confronting the powerful system of the majority,” Kolirin explains. “That absurdity was present in Jewish cinema and literature because Jews were always a minority. But Israeli cinema erased it, because it began to adopt the perspective of the authoritarian ruler, through the soldier’s point of view, for example. When I read Kashua’s book, it restored my Jewish perspective and Jewish historical memory, the memory of the oppressed. This is the film’s true identity, not the Israeli identity.”
The controversy over whether Let It Be Morning is Israeli or Palestinian reflects the struggle over identity experienced by its characters, and raises a question: does acknowledging the film’s Israeli identity entail an Israeli appropriation of the Palestinian narrative? Whatever its identity, however, the film has won praise from international critics and drawn attention to the racial discrimination Palestinians face inside Israel, both through its subject matter and through the media uproar its actors have caused.
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