A police photo has to be taken of the fisherman Issa Nasser, 60 years old, resident in Al-Shati, a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The reason: He is suspected of possessing art objects. Or actually already convicted. During a house search, a statue was found on him that he had fished out of the sea a few days earlier. A representation of the god Apollo, which poses a number of puzzles to experts. Because she couldn't have been in the sea for a long time, otherwise she would be more affected. And is it valuable? The photo of Issa shows a man with distinctive features, a gray beard and a bald head. He can certainly be considered attractive, and to a certain extent he has to be, because he has big plans: He wants to get married. The woman he wants to share his life withhe has long since made it out. Her name is Siham, a seamstress who also commutes daily from Al-Shati to the market and back again in the evening. Siham is played in the film "Gaza mon amour" by Hiam Abbass, probably the best-known and greatest star that Palestinian cinema has. A cinema that, by the way, doesn't really exist, just as Hiam Abbas is nominally run as an actress from Israel, although she has repeatedly put her prestige in the service of the Palestinian cause.just as Hiam Abbas is nominally listed as an actress from Israel, although she has repeatedly placed her prestige in the service of the Palestinian cause.just as Hiam Abbas is nominally listed as an actress from Israel, although she has repeatedly placed her prestige in the service of the Palestinian cause.
A normal art house film from the Gaza Strip?
With “Gaza mon amour”, Tarzan and Arab Nasser, who perform under the catchy name The Nasser Brothers, set out to found Palestinian cinema. Namely a little different from what was previously known from a great auteur filmmaker like Elia Suleiman, who devoted his entire career to the absurdities of an existence in a country that doesn't exist, although many people definitely live there. The Nasser brothers are trying to bring an allegedly completely normal arthouse film from the Gaza Strip to the world cinema stage: an emotional story in which love is once again the key to everything. The Gaza Strip is nominally an autonomous area, but most people there experience it as a prison under the rule of the Islamist Hamas.In “Gaza mon amour” one of the images for this limited radius is the five-mile zone that Issa is allowed to travel through with his boat. The statue looks like a transgression, because it tells of another Mediterranean, of a culturally open one, of mixtures and quotations.
The Nasser brothers also found this openness for their film. However, they had to leave Gaza to do so. “Gaza mon amour” lists France, Portugal, Germany and Qatar among its co-production countries, the shooting was mainly in Jordan, but also in Portugal, the production language is Arabic. The story of Issa and Siham is not subject to censorship, but it is told as if there were no point in getting even closer to the political circumstances. At one point you can hear a propaganda speech from Hamas, in which the aim is to justify the current difficulties because they serve a greater goal: a free and whole Palestine. Nobody wants to hear the end of this sermon, it is simply turned off.