04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti makes effective use of an ensemble cast in this portrait of contemporary family life in Israel, replete with its many intricacies

A slice of life with an (over)dose of cascading consequences: in his sophomore feature, Happy Holidays [+see also:
interview: Scandar Copti
film profile], Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti focuses once more on the multidimensionality of life in contemporary Israel, which bursts at the seams with unspoken subtext and unresolved tensions, both personally and politically informed. His debut feature, Ajami [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2009), co-directed by Yaron Shani, won the Caméra d’Or Special Mention at Cannes and picked up an Oscar nomination. Written, directed and edited by Copti, Happy Holidays has just enjoyed its world premiere in the Orizzonti competition of the 2024 Venice Film Festival.

Happy Holidays is broken down into different chapters of mini-stories that overlap (but are not strictly chronological), focused on the interlocking lives of Israeli Arab siblings Fifi (Manar Shehab) and Rami (Toufic Danial), their mother Hanan (Wafaa Aoun) and father Fouad (Imad Hourani), and Rami’s partner Shirley (Shani Dahari) and her sister Miri (Meirav Memoresky), who are both Jewish. Rami protests about Shirley’s decision not to get an abortion, while Miri begins to meddle with their relationship and Shirley’s pregnancy journey. Hanan and Fouad are dealing with financial troubles, so Hanan files for compensation related to a car accident that Fifi gets into. Meanwhile, a careful romance flourishes between Rami’s doctor friend Walid (Raed Burbara) and Fifi, but she is hiding secrets of her own.

Underpinning Happy Holidays’ networked relationships is a deep-seated feeling of unsettlement – played out with perfect unease by a cast of non-professional actors – as seen in the characters’ ongoing discontent as the status quo. By following nearly every strand of each story (altogether bookmarked on each end by the celebration of Jewish holidays), the network of relationships grows a bit muddled over the film’s two-hour running time. But Copti’s forte is picking out everyday anxieties and channelling them into a condensed format, reminiscent of the cinematic scenarios of Asghar Farhadi. Time passes very quickly within each chapter, but each scene – lensed with dry, unobtrusive cinematography by Tim Kuhn – seems to hold a lifetime within it.

Just as each character is doing their best to make life work, Copti provides no easy answers of right or wrong. In the filmmaker’s world, objective truth seems to bend slightly around the edges, and we find that things aren’t always as they seem. What we take as fact in one chapter we may learn later was entirely fabricated or manipulated – shifting our perspective, in a kaleidoscopic fashion, with a single turn of the screw.

Notable to the film’s settings is that Copti portrays life in Israel as he knows it, shown both through plot points and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it elements in the backdrop. Social pressures are inextricable from political ones: Arab-Jewish interfaith couples are heavily discouraged, while drawings of foetuses wearing military berets are scattered throughout hospitals. The sound of missile sirens in schools is normalised, while primary-school children are taught to venerate soldiers. Women are expected to be pure and demure, just as mothers put pressure on their teenage daughters to accept the military draft, in the case of Miri.

These elements slowly seep into our characters' realities, influencing their personal decisions that eventually have far-reaching consequences. The filmmaker neither shouts (social or political) revolution from the rooftops nor didactically pressures for reform, but he is no less meek for it. Instead, he lets audiences draw their own conclusions from what they witness on screen. Through the film’s naturalistic sound design (by Maximilien Gobiet, Pierre Tucat and Matthias Schwab), which is almost entirely devoid of non-diegetic music save for a few Arabic songs, we are further forced to confront Copti’s sociopolitical reality in the flesh.

Happy Holidays is a co-production between Fresco Films (Palestine), Red Balloon Film (Germany), Tessalit Productions (France) and Intramovies (Italy). Indie Sales is managing its world sales.