Muayad Alayan on His Jerusalem-Set Drama ‘Conversation With the Sea’:’You Cannot Avoid the Almost Two Million Palestinians Living in Israel’

Jerusalem-based director Muayad Alayan’s drama “Conversation With the Sea,” about an elderly Palestinian man who is suddenly ordered by an Israeli court to pay a large social security debt pertaining to a long deceased son, will soon get its Middle East launch at the Doha Film Festival. After playing positively in Venice and Toronto, “Conversation With the Sea” will bow for Arab audiences during the Nov. 19-27 event organized by the Doha Film Institute which, as Alayan points out, “is one of the most supportive institutions for Palestinian films.” The timely political drama is led by veteran Palestinian actor Kamel El Basha (winner of the 2017 best actor prize in Venice for “The Insult”). He plays an elderly widowed baker named Kamal who lives in the Old City of Jerusalem. Kamal gets a Kafkaesque notice from an Israeli court demanding payment of a large social security debt allegedly owed by his son Wael who decades earlier drowned in the Red Sea, though no official record of the son’s death can be found. The film’s inciting incident is inspired by true events that happened to the helmer’s family. According to Alayan they reflect the life of Palestinians living in Jerusalem where “you encounter soldiers and armed settlers on a daily basis,” as the director puts it. Alayan spoke to Variety about “Conversation With the Sea” and its particular relevance in the aftermath of the recent Israeli elections following which Gadi Eisenkot, the leading rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently has a chance to form Israel’s governing coalition with support from Arab parties that are not formal members of his coalition. How did this twisted story originate? I read that something similar happened in your family Yes. Years ago, my father-in-law and my wife received an injunction from the Israeli social security service asking them for a huge amount of money they claimed was owed by my late brother-in-law who passed away by drowning over 20 years ago. It was a shock for the family. It was really very emotional for everybody. Apparently on their system, he appeared to be alive, so he was taxable. And the family had to prove his death. So my father-in-law had to go on a road trip to get documents from the hospital to prove that his son was dead. I was silent for a while. I didn’t have the courage to ask permission to take that incident and write something around it. Then, a year later, I did. I promised them that this tragic incident would be fictionalized and dramatized enough so that it would not clearly be our family. What happened for me really represents the subtle yet tormenting pressure cooker that Palestinian Jerusalemites are put in. You’re put into this system that is not designed by you, or anybody that represents you, and that is very racial and clearly has a task of pushing you out of the city through taxation and twisted laws. Laws that are applicable only to you. These types of incidents, which are on the rise, are not really being represented because you have a genocide happening in the background. And ethnic cleansing going on everywhere through physical means. So they get kind of sidelined. Talk to me about working with lead actor Kamel El Basha, whom I believe is also a Palestinian Jerusalemite I’ve known Kamal for over 20 years, since I was a teenager and I saw him playing in the Palestinian Theater in Jerusalem. He was an icon. He was a star. He still is, of course. Later on, after film school, when I was working on my first short, I cast him in a secondary role, and I’ve since cast him in almost all of my features. But this time I had him in mind when I was writing. After the second draft, I started getting worried. I thought: “I need to talk to him. What if he doesn’t like this?” So somewhere between the second and the third draft, I met him after having sent him the script. We had breakfast at his home and we discussed it. He immediately knew the world that I was delving into because he grew up in and around the old city. He had family who faced similar circumstances with evacuations from their homes. He was a political prisoner when he was a teenager, so he really knows life under occupation in Jerusalem very well. What was shooting in Jerusalem like? Was it tough to get a permit? To be able to shoot in Jerusalem, we had to be a really, really small crew. Otherwise there is no way you can film in the Old City or anywhere around it. We filmed at a very sensitive time, right after the so-called ceasefire. As for permits, we had to design the production in such a way that we looked like a documentary crew, so we didn’t have to get permits because, as a Palestinian production, it would not have been a realistic prospect. The big winners of the recent elections in Israel seem to be the two Arab parties. Would you like them to join forces with Eisenkot and his coalition? Is that something that you think is a possibility? I can tell you what I’m sensing on the streets. I think what these elections did is that they put the Israeli political scene and society, face to face with the reality that you cannot avoid the almost two million Palestinians living in Israel who have Israeli citizenships. You cannot avoid dealing with this. If this population votes [and they do], they are going to have some weight in your political system. And not wanting to recognize their identity, their culture, their background and their connection to their fellow Palestinians is like putting your head in the sand and pretending there is no problem. This is what this election did. Nobody can form a government without the Arab Palestinian parties. Yet, some parties are still not willing do that. The issue for the the Arab parties is that they refuse to be part of a government that is occupying their fellow Palestinians’ [land], and are committing crimes. So there is this possible dead end. But what everybody seems to be wishing for, at least in the anti-Netanyahu camp, is basically this: “Even if you guys cannot find a way to be together, at least work together for some period of time until we guarantee that Netanyahu is out.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Courtesy Venice Film Festival