The Sea: How an Israeli director’s moving film about a Palestinian boy become a target for Netanyahu’s government
Israeli film director Shai Carmeli-Pollak has a striking image pinned to the wall of his office in Kfar Sava. The picture, designed by his late friend and artist Dudu Geva, depicts a cartoon duck being pierced open with a knife.
“It is like what’s happening now. An apocalypse,” he tells The Independent. “He has many knives stuck in his body but is still optimistic. That’s how I feel.”
He has reason to feel both joy and fear. Last week, his film The Sea swept up five trophies at Israel’s national film awards, The Ophirs, including the top prize for Best Picture.
It follows the story of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy Khaled, played by Muhammad Gazawi, who dreams of seeing the Mediterranean for the first time in his life. However, he is turned away at a military checkpoint while on a school trip, due to what authorities say is an invalid permit.
The film places Palestinian lives at its core, which has caused anger in Israel. Within hours of the award being given out, Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar threatened to cut funding for the ceremony, blasting the win as a “slap in the face of Israeli citizens” and calling the event “embarrassing and detached”.
But Carmeli-Pollak says it is the “terrible reality of the government that this person belongs to, which is now creating a genocide and we can’t deny it. We can’t blame films.”
Last month, a UN report concluded that Israel is committing genocide. Israel says the charge is “false” and “distorted” but rights groups, including Amnesty International, have backed the claims.
The Sea is not the only recent film to critique Israel that has been met with backlash . Earlier this year, No Other Land , a story following Palestinian activist Basel Adra’s resistance to forced displacement from his home in Massafer Yatta, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film.
The reaction in Israel was similar: Zohar called it “a sad moment for the world of cinema” and “sabotage against the State of Israel”.
A Palestinian activist and father-of-three featured in the film, Awdah Hathaleen, was killed by an Israeli settler weeks after the film’s success. Adra has also reported recent raids on his home in the West Bank.
Reflecting on his work, Carmeli-Pollak says: “Making a film like this isn’t simple to do, even before the war.
“There’s always a spirit here that there is too much support for dissident films, which are not for the Israeli public but to go to audiences outside Israel and show how terrible we are. It’s always like this, but now it’s even stronger.”
Reacting to Zohar’s comments about his film, Carmeli-Pollak says it’s become “tradition” for the culture minister to speak out against projects that he disapproves of. “I would tell him to open his mind and watch the film before he speaks,” he says.
He credits the Israel Film Fund for its support in backing the film but worries it may be “impossible” to operate in an environment with such constraints on artists.
