Talleen Abu Hanna preferred to flee the war, if only for 24 hours. At the end of April in Paris, far from the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas, the 29-year-old transgender woman, wearing a blue silk top and meticulous make-up, tried to forget the dead, the risk of regional conflagration and her "tug of war" over the national unity demanded by Israel, as she was born into a Palestinian Christian family from Nazareth, in northern Israel.
After six months of military operations, Hanna seemed afraid to take a stand at a time when Israel's LGBTQ+ community was being blacklisted abroad by part of the pro-Palestinian movement, which accused it of tacitly endorsing the war being waged by the Israeli state. Beside her, Israela Lev, 63, a veteran fighter for LGBTQ+ rights who presents herself as both Hanna's manager and her "mother" (a protective figure in queer culture), sighed with sadness when asked about the conflict: "Rather than take a gun in our hands to go to war, we'd rather do our nails, put on make-up, inject Botox." Or go to the Cannes Film Festival.
In May, Hanna and Lev will go to the French Riviera to present the documentary La Belle de Gaza (The Belle from Gaza), directed by Yolande Zauberman (Would You Have Sex with an Arab? in 2011 and M, winner of the César for Best Documentary Film in 2020). It will be shown in a special screening on May 22, ahead of its theatrical release on May 29. Shot before the war, the film interweaves the sometimes tragic fates of a number of different transgender women in Israel, many of them sex workers gathered on the same grim Tel Aviv street.
A young woman, the Belle in the title, is said to have fled the Gaza Strip, where she was threatened with death because of her trans identity, and went to Tel Aviv on foot. Hanna does not play this mysterious character, who appears only briefly in the documentary. But she is a central figure in the story, a symbol of success, a beacon of hope in the midst of other, darker journeys. On that day in Paris, she said little about the Israel-Gaza conflict, concentrating instead on the plight of transgender people, whom she described as being "at war with their bodies."
Famous in her homeland, she is partly responsible for promoting the film. Model, dancer, reality TV personality (the local version of Big Brother), she was also the face of an advertising campaign for the Spanish ready-to-wear brand Desigual. Followed by more than 315,000 people on Instagram, she finds that it's not unusual for her to be approached on the streets of Tel Aviv by fans looking for a selfie. This happens even in the current climate. "When the guns are firing, we have to respond with hope," Hanna said with a smile.
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