05/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The Palestinian director breaks down his methods of writing and shooting as well as interrogating concepts like morality and the normalisation of oppression

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

Palestinian director Scandar Copti brings his sophomore feature (and solo directorial debut), Happy Holidays [+see also:
film review
interview: Scandar Copti
film profile], to Venice’s Orizzonti competition. We spoke to him about morality and the normalisation of oppression, among other topics.

Cineuropa: Happy Holidays relies on a community that’s very large but also very tight-knit: every action and every person have a significant influence within this network. As a screenwriter and director, how did you begin to conceptualise and build this suite of characters?
Scandar Copti: I usually have a process that comes from what I call an annoyance: something that bothers me and affects me on a personal level. And I start looking into it, trying to figure out why it is happening, and really break it down into all of the elements. Once I delve into this process, the characters just start appearing. Everything you see in a film is based on something that happened in reality. So, I absorbed those stories, and they basically drove me crazy. I understood somehow that it has to do with the sense of morality that we have. This is why, as you said, one single person can affect the whole group that shares the same morality with them. I mean, we say that morality binds, but it also blinds, right?

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I don't start by writing a group of characters; I start with the character that suffers the most. I try to understand who is affected the most, which becomes the protagonist. In this case, we have four protagonists. I need to create their suffering, and I need to create it through relationships and power dynamics up to a stage at which I understand that it's being conveyed on all levels: emotional, psychological and also intellectual. It's the most enjoyable yet most frustrating process that any filmmaker goes through because it has to do with your own narcissism. I’m usually very concerned about the scriptwriting because I edit my own films, and I like to edit almost brainlessly. So I really need to have a script that imitates reality because of the way I work.

Does this imitation of reality also affect how you work as a director and how you work with the actors?
The filmmaking process was also very unusual. All the people that you see in the film are non-professional actors. They're real people that come from the professional background of the characters that they portray. For example, Miri is a real nurse, and Walid is a real doctor. I work in a system that I've designed, which is based on our ability to react with real emotions to fiction. The people you see were never given any scripts. They didn't know what the story was about. They went through a very long process that made them experience, through roleplay, the histories and the relationships of their characters within the true setting of the film. It's basically like a documentary, but I'm pulling the strings from high up, manipulating everything.

You don’t provide prescriptive answers to any issues you bring up, but you engage very closely with a lot of concepts regarding bodily autonomy and social discipline of the body, particularly for women.
I'm a big believer in the process of liberation, and I truly believe that nobody's free until everybody's free. And by everybody, I mean the most oppressed element of this chain that is struggling for freedom. In my case, it's women. They are oppressed politically, culturally and socially, so they're overall the most oppressed. I think that only through the liberation of women can we achieve true liberation, and it has to do with a mentality that people need to develop because you cannot really choose what to be liberated from. You cannot just say, “Fight for the rights of X,” but ignore the rights of others who are going through similar oppression, or even worse.

There’s a macro-relatability in the drama happening between family and friends, but there are also moments that highlight hyper-specific, hyper-local issues and phenomena. We hear missile sirens, but then we also see the integration of Israeli military symbols in everyday life.
I think what I try to show throughout the film is the concept of cause and effect. Everything has its reasons, a clear motivation and a clear process that leads to what is happening. In one of the chapters with Miri, we don't understand how things work. We might be quick to judge and say, “Oh, this is a horrible person doing this horrible thing,” right? But then in Fifi’s chapter, we understand how indoctrination works through school. Then, it's clearer that these are good human beings who are trapped in a corrupt system that designs and programs them with all those different forces to become a specific human being with a very specific morality that serves something. This process truly exists in all societies, and obviously in Israeli society. These are the processes I went through as a Palestinian because I went to an international French school under Israeli law. And a siren, you cannot not hear it, right? All those [Jewish] holidays, you cannot unsee them, because they're in the media, they’re everywhere. This process, which maybe people don't think about, has to do with how people eventually normalise and rationalise horrible things.