26 Medfilm Festival
Issa (Salim Daw), 60 years old, suddenly decides to get married and falls in love with Sihan (Hiam Abbass) a widow who lives with his divorced daughter with whom he has a conflictual relationship and who works as a seamstress in a shop near the market.Issa is a fisherman who is a bit of a philosopher, his occupation the main one seems to be the long chats with a friend who runs a drug store/perfume shop and who is planning to emigrate illegally to Europe.
The Nasser Brothers are betting everything on this character to whom it is impossible not to become attached given that, when faced with love, he seems like a shy and awkward teenager just starting out.
To further complicate things we also puts her sister, determined to find a right wife for Issa and above all the discovery of an ancient statue of the God Apollo in the sea.
It will be exactly this find to cause an endless series of troubles for our hero who will have to deal with the corruption of the Palestinian police.
Gaza, mon amour< 38> is a delightful daring comedy that narrates, between delicacy and clumsiness, love in old age and which ends leaving a smile of joy on the spectator.
<10 >The two directors (also directors of photography and screenwriters) choose to tell us about daily life in Gaza and the Palestinian situation, choosing a light-hearted approach that does not hide a second, much more political level of reading.<3 >So while Issa desperately searches for a way to declare himself, all the other issues swirl in the background.
From clandestine emigration to Europe, on often deadly journeys of hope, to the everyday reality of bombings, continuous blackouts and non-existent public services.
< 1>Accompanying this portrait is the background chatter of television which seems to broadcast only three types of programmes, soap operas and films based on tormented love, endless television debates and revolutionary proclamations from Hamas.
The critical streak of the two brothers, however, emerges even more clearly in the description of the police forces, intent on harassing the poor protagonist with brutal methods and only interested in extracting maximum personal profit from the discovery of the statue.
Political denunciation is often entrusted to withering jokes, such as the one in which the art historian commits the imprudence of saying "the statue of the God Apollo" and is immediately accused of being unfaithful.
Or the two authors rely on situations between the comic and the absurd such as the parade of potential brides who Issa's sister brings him home, however highlighting the difficult condition of women in today's Palestine.
They don't go lightly even with Hamas resumed while celebrating the The arrival of a missile is portrayed, essentially, as a group of fanatics totally disinterested in the fate of the population.
Issa thus ends up embodying nostalgia for a past in which the sea was not a strip of dirty water only three miles long and one could dream of taking the rich daughter of a bourgeois family as a bride.
In the end, the tender love between these two elderly people appears to be the only possible defense tool against a stagnant situation, devoid of a future and full of continuous difficulties.
From this point of view, the last scene in which the two take refuge to make love on the fisherman's boat but trespass into waters controlled by the Israeli army is memorable.
< 10>As they say, omnia vincit amor.
EMILIANO BAGLIO
