These two films that come out on the screens this Wednesday, April 23 are inhabited by reports to the reality so different that it may seem absurd, or even obscene, to mention them side by side.
The story of the Palestinian doctor arguing stubbornly for peace while a flood of fire is continuously falling on his country is, formally, a basic document, which would have a priori more place on television (where it is necessary to wish, without too much to believe it, that it will also be broadcast), but which takes on a dimension of mythological tragedy and horror film with regard to what is happening at the moment in the Gaza Strip.
Federico Luis’ film works between documentary and fiction, with a subtle and attentive generosity, romantic and joyful. He enters a whole range of perceptions of differences between humans, where the notion of mental handicap is constantly reconfigured by the very project of realization and its implementation with multiple tones.
Incomparable by their subject as by the means of cinema mobilized, these two films participate together in the multiplicity of relationships with the real that we live, whether we accept or not pay attention.
And they find themselves testifying to this thickness of reality, which still has many other elements – infinitely heterogeneous – and which make our daily newspapers, singular for each. Both exceptional, oh how differently, the two situations to which these two films refer are also, a little, a little, a little, incentives to deal with the world without being locked up either in obsession or in denial.
“A doctor for peace”, by Tal Barda
It may be that, first, what happens to the screen appears derisory, on the scale of the genocide in progress in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army methodically massacres civilians by whole families for months, while the French media compete in convoluted formulas which are all infamies. Derisory? Maybe. And yet necessary.
There is what happened, the story of Doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor having, despite the countless violence and injustices committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians for decades, continued as long as he has been able to try to embody another way than hatred.
This story is told and documented by the film of the Franco-American director Tal Barda, born and having grown in Israel. This story is known, it is the subject of a book, I will not hate – a doctor from Gaza on the paths of peacein which we learn that Izzeldin Abuelaish, a child of a Palestinian refugee camp who became obstetrician, worked in an Israeli hospital until the day of 2009, when a tsahal tank pulled on his home, killing three of his daughters and a niece.
Of this pain, the DR Abuelaish, who has since emigrated to Canada with her surviving children, stubbornly tried to do a peace force, overcoming hatred, while looking in vain to have their responsibility recognized by the Israeli authorities. All of his career has earned him many recognition brands in the world, as well as five unfinished proposals for the Nobel Peace Prize. Archives and testimonies accompany the story of his tragic career.
And then there is the film. That is to say, in addition to all these factual elements, what images and sounds make sensitive, places, lights, vibration of voices, the materiality of the traces.
There is the incredible episode of Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, who is on the air when the doctor immediately calls him after shooting and which makes viewers hear the pain of a father who discovers the assassination of his three daughters and his niece by soldiers with the star of David. There is also the soap opera of the multiple lies of the Israeli authorities to refuse to recognize this crime, like all the others.
But the film is also now the dizzying effect of the contemporaneity of its release and the absolute violence of what is in progress at the moment. Since the start of the current extermination war, twenty-two members of the family of Izzeldin Abuelaish have been killed. Their names and photos – children and young girls for the most part – appear at the end of A peace for peace. At the top of the film poster, it is written: “On the paths of hope in Gaza”. But these paths, strewn with corpses, are now buried under the ruins.
Therefore, there remains the question on the very meaning of still making films evoking the situation in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. Since October 2023, many of them have reached major screens in France: Yallah Gaza, No Other Land, travels to Gaza, to an unknown country, from Ground Zero, Dream… But in addition to the multiple debates and meetings that these sessions arouse, the extreme violence deployed against people linked to these films is a paradoxical confirmation that what cinema can, as limited this may be, still exists.
After the brutal assault by Jewish settlers from one of the Palestinian directors of No Other Land,, Just after having received the Oscar for the best documentary, the assassination by Tsahal of the photojournalist Fatima Hassouna and ten members of his family, immediately after the announcement of the projection of the film devoted to the Cannes Film Festival, seems to indicate that the obstinate presence of evocations on the screen of the in progress horrors do not indicate to those who commit them. It’s horribly little, it’s not nothing.
“Simón de la Montaña”, by Federico Luis
They are on the mountainside, climb a vertiginously arid and rocky summit. It is a group of young people in the fog and the wind that get up. There is no longer any network to call for help when it appears that they are lost. They are worried but not panicked, they react in various ways. In the group, some have a little strange behavior, but not that much.
Later they are in this large building, which we understand that it is a place of reception for people in situations of mental handicap – formula, as we know, which designates very variable states, according to individuals and also often in the same individual. Among the residents, Simón linked in particular to Pehuén, who seems strong and full of resources, while the juvenile and rebel colo does not conceal that she is attracted by this large boy recently arrived among them.
But who is it? Why is it there? Try to discover it, as encourages Simón de la Montañait is to question the criteria with which each and everyone looks and interacts with others. The others: people with behaviors considered to be deviant and also caregivers, civil servants, a mother, a small employer.
Over the course of situations of daily life, conflicts, games that can go wrong, anger, transgressions, small and less small emotional, physical, administrative adventures, unfolds around Simón a kind of uncertain and lively farandole.
Unhappy in the place that his mother, his mother’s companion and the usual order of existence want to assign him, Simón vibrates and gets drunk from the energies that those among whom he has interfered. So he sometimes goes too far. And if we confront him with his excesses, he goes even further.
This is the unclassifiable film which remains mysterious throughout, set in motion by the Argentinian filmmaker Federico Luis. Even more mysterious for whom, outside his country, does not know Lorenzo Ferro, actor and singer known in Argentina, who interprets Simón.
Uncertainty about what is played and what is captured on the spot, on the control share of each performer, actor (not) or not, on what happens and what he or she participates, turns out to be an astonishing cinematographic wealth.
It is not only a question of questioning the norm and the “difference”, a legitimate issue and which deserves to be activated again. It is, thanks to Simón, Pehuén, Colo, Agustin and the others – and thanks to what invented with them the filmmaker – to live an experience of spectator full of humor and concern, curiosity and emotions. A film, what.
