Muayad Alayan’s “Conversation With the Sea” Heads to Doha

By Grace Kim

Jerusalem-based director Muayad Alayan’s “Conversation With the Sea” will open for Arab audiences at the Doha Film Festival on Nov. 19-27. The political drama arrives after positive receptions at Venice and Toronto, according to Variety, and enters a program organized by the Doha Film Institute. Alayan calls that body “one of the most supportive institutions for Palestinian films.”

Veteran Palestinian actor Kamel El Basha stars as Kamal, an elderly widowed baker in Jerusalem’s Old City. El Basha won the 2017 best actor prize in Venice for “The Insult.” In Variety’s synopsis, Kamal receives an Israeli court order demanding a large social security debt, money the state says his son still owes.

His son Wael drowned in the Red Sea decades earlier, yet no official record of his death can be found. The discrepancy drives the story: the state still treats Wael as liable for a debt that follows his family.

How did a family debt dispute become a film?

Alayan told Variety the story began when his father-in-law and wife received an injunction (a formal court order) from the Israeli social security service. The agency demanded a huge sum for Alayan’s late brother-in-law, who had drowned more than 20 years earlier. Because the system still showed him as alive and taxable, the family had to prove that he was dead.

Alayan’s father-in-law took a road trip to obtain hospital documents as proof. Alayan said the shock was deeply emotional for the family and that he stayed silent because he lacked the courage to ask permission to adapt the incident.

A year later, Alayan said, he wrote around the incident and promised the family that he would fictionalize and dramatize it so it would not clearly identify them. “What happened for me really represents the subtle yet tormenting pressure cooker that Palestinian Jerusalemites are put in,” he said.

He described a system “not designed by you, or anybody that represents you,” with a racial aim to push residents out of the city “through taxation and twisted laws,” laws “applicable only to you.” Alayan said such incidents were rising but went unrepresented because “you have a genocide happening in the background” and “ethnic cleansing going on everywhere through physical means.” They “get kind of sidelined.”

The film’s wider setting comes from Alayan’s experience of Palestinian life in Jerusalem, where “you encounter soldiers and armed settlers on a daily basis.” He said the family case reflects that environment.

Why did Alayan cast Kamel El Basha?

Alayan said he had known El Basha for more than 20 years, first seeing him perform at the Palestinian Theater in Jerusalem when Alayan was a teenager. He called the actor “an icon” and “a star,” and added, “He still is, of course.”

After film school, Alayan cast El Basha in a secondary role in his first short and then in almost all of his features. For “Conversation With the Sea,” he wrote with the actor in mind, but worried after the second draft: “I need to talk to him. What if he doesn’t like this?”

He sent the script and met El Basha for breakfast at his home between the second and third draft. El Basha, Alayan said, immediately understood the world because he had grown up in and around the Old City.

His family had faced similar circumstances, including evacuations from their homes, and he had been a political prisoner as a teenager. “So he really knows life under occupation in Jerusalem very well,” Alayan said.

How did the production shoot in Jerusalem?

Alayan said the team needed a “really, really small crew,” because there was otherwise no way to film in the Old City or around it. The shoot took place at a sensitive moment, right after the so-called ceasefire.

The production was designed to look like a documentary crew, which meant it did not seek permits. As a Palestinian production, Alayan said, securing permission would not have been a realistic prospect.

What does the election change for Arab parties?

Alayan spoke to Variety after recent Israeli elections left Gadi Eisenkot, the leading rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with a chance to form Israel’s governing coalition. That prospect depended on support from Arab parties that were not formal members of his coalition.

Variety’s interviewer put the two Arab parties forward as the elections’ apparent “big winners” and asked whether they might join forces with Eisenkot. Alayan said the elections put Israel’s political scene and society face to face with “the reality that you cannot avoid the almost two million Palestinians living in Israel who have Israeli citizenships.”

If this population votes, Alayan argued, it must carry weight in the political system. He said some parties still refused to recognize Palestinian identity, culture, background and connections to other Palestinians.

Alayan compared that position to putting “your head in the sand and pretending there is no problem.” No government could form without the Arab Palestinian parties, he said, yet some parties remained unwilling to join one.

He described a “possible dead end”: Arab parties refuse to join a government “occupying their fellow Palestinians’ [land], and are committing crimes.” Much of the anti-Netanyahu camp, Alayan said, seemed to want those parties to “work together for some period of time until we guarantee that Netanyahu is out.”

Alayan built the film around a bureaucratic mechanism: a missing death record produces a debt that reaches surviving relatives. The Nov. 19-27 Doha launch puts that family story before an Arab audience just as Alayan says Arab parties can no longer be ignored in coalition talks. The practical test for the film is whether its narrow legal mechanism can carry the political argument he makes about Palestinian electoral weight.