Attentive to the situation in the Middle East, Montpellier's Cinemed festival has, over the course of its history, regularly been caught up in the conflicts that are tearing the region apart. This was exemplarily the case for the edition held from October 20 to 28, 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the nameless massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. This year, the situation was made even worse by the scale of the Israeli retaliation, which included massive bombardments against civilians.
Eleven films, including shorts and features, from this warn-torn zone were selected. There were six Palestinian films, four Lebanese and one Israeli. It's an intriguing count, given the human and political sensitivity of the situation. Yet there has been no shortage of Israeli films over the past year. Two of them were selected for the Venice Film Festival, despite the boycott that targeted them: Of Dogs and Men by Dani Rosenberg and Why War by Amos Gitai. Does this inexplicable reduction in the Israeli presence, given current events, lend credence to the rumor of an "unofficial boycott" of the festivals that has been circulating since Cannes?
Christophe Leparc, the event's director, insisted that "in the selection process, we don't restrict ourselves in any way, nor do we censor anything. The selection was made, as it is every year, by considering above all the cinematographic point of view. The submissions from Israel were fewer in number and qualitatively less than stellar. Many of the over-hyped contributions were not always the most compelling. Perhaps what was lacking was the incubation time needed to put things down and turn them into a work of art." The argument is so sound that, in truth, it concerns the majority of the works selected for Montpellier.
It's a truism to say that accumulated suffering and hatred don't encourage what we ideally have the right to expect from cinema: the intelligence of historical complexity and the imperative of a shared presence. Few films meet this expectation, and only those that take the risk of a healthy distancing, not only from the current upheavel, but more broadly from the mutual refusal of recognition that has long poisoned the region. Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel's To a Land Unknown deliberately takes the high road, following two Palestinian refugees stranded in Greece but determined to make their fortune in Germany.
No Other Land, a Palestinian documentary by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, bears witness to Israel's increasingly rampant colonization of the West Bank, bringing together Basel, a young Palestinian expelled from his village, and Yuval, an Israeli peace activist, who comes to his aid, in the same movement of humanity and indignation. We also really liked An Orange from Jaffa by Gaza-born filmmaker Mohammed Almughanni, who created an engaging film in the vein of Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention, 2002). This short film brings together a pressed young Palestinian and the head of an Israeli checkpoint with similarly embarrassing mothers, who restore both of them, beyond their simmering hatred, to a common humanity.
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