'Father Father' Charts a Gay Israeli-Palestinian Couple's Path to Parenthood

"Father Father," a documentary premiering at Festival do Rio, follows Aviv, a Jewish Israeli, and his Palestinian-Israeli husband Khader as they travel to Texas, where a surrogate delivers their son Albi on Oct. 6, 2023 — hours before Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

British documentarian Jake Witzenfeld directed the film. His 2015 feature "Oriented" followed three Palestinian gay men in Tel Aviv in the lead-up to the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. "Father Father" records a love story strained but not broken by politics and war.

"This film definitely wants to keep alive the dream of a possibility of love across difference, and the hope that it can exist even in this very dark moment," Witzenfeld said in his first interview for the film, given to Variety.

"There's no question that we are in a challenging cultural moment for films that want to try to say that there can be an opening [between Israelis and Palestinians]," he added. "But I hope that Khader, Aviv and Albi's story can do just that."

The project began in spring 2021, when Khader — whom Witzenfeld has known since making "Oriented" more than a decade ago — called to say he and Aviv were considering starting a family. Witzenfeld, then based in London, assembled development money and began following the process without a fixed outcome. "My instinct was that it felt like an interesting time to start looking at the future of a Muslim and a Jewish mixed gay couple in Tel Aviv," he said.

The political timing shaped the film. Benjamin Netanyahu was voted out and out of power for roughly nine months before returning; once his government skewed far right, the documentary gained what Witzenfeld calls a macro context: whether the couple could "hang in there and fight." The mass protests Khader and Aviv attend in the film responded to a judicial reform that threatened their safety as a gay couple in Israel.

One of the film's pivotal scenes unfolds at a surrogacy agency, where the couple learns that Israeli policy requires both parents to be of the same religion — forcing them to pursue surrogacy in Texas. "To me, it's one of the most fascinating moments in the film," Witzenfeld said. "It shows the complexity of the state of Israel — a country that undeniably has a broad range of liberal freedoms that are in negotiation with the nature of the state as Jewish — and I think that moment is kind of absurd." He added: "From my perspective, I would like there to be total freedom."

The production wrapped its Texas shoot around Albi's birth on Oct. 6, with plans to fly back to Tel Aviv around the 10th. The attack on the morning of Oct. 7 changed everything. The couple waited in Texas for about a month; Witzenfeld extended his stay and kept filming. Shooting continued intermittently over the following year, up to Albi's first birthday, which falls within a week of the war's first anniversary.

Witzenfeld counts the couple's endurance as the film's core. "They came out of COVID into a multi-year, mega-expensive process with complex medical procedures involving birth and then a war that hit them a week later. It's kind of insane," he said. The war takes a toll, and the film captures a moment when their differences "couldn't really be any louder." Yet it makes room for those contradictions without resolving them — which, he said, is what Khader and Aviv themselves do.

"I think that's a beautiful lesson right now," Witzenfeld said. "At a time when we can barely sit next to somebody on a bus who has contradictions with us, I think there's something incredibly powerful about that."

Access narrowed during the war as the new parents became protective, with relatives in the Israel Defense Forces reserves and, at times, suffering fatal consequences. The film's ending gave Khader space to speak directly to Albi, in what Witzenfeld describes as a very raw address.

The final scene places Khader's mother, in a hijab, talking with Aviv's brother, an AK-47 on his lap from his reserve service, as they discuss cooking. "They obviously have very different opinions, and come from very different worlds. They go home and watch very different news," Witzenfeld said. "But there's something about that, that, in a small way, this film chooses to celebrate."

How the film plays inside Israel remains an open question, one Witzenfeld ties to the country's upcoming election in a few weeks.