A Bottle in the Gaza Sea
is an unusually powerful film about the Israeli-palestinian divide, Jeff Heinrich writes.
Tal Levine is 17, a young Jew who lives in Jerusalem with her parents and older brother. Naïm Al-farjouk is 20, a Palestinian youth who dreams of a better life outside Gaza, where he was born. As the dove flies, only about 100 kilometres separate the two. But more than distance keeps them apart. Jew and Arab, rich and poor, Tal and Naïm are from two different worlds, never to speak. But what if they tried? That was the premise behind French author Valérie Zenatti’s young-adult novel unebouteille dans la mer de Gaza, published in 2005 and translated into English as Message in a Bottle. In the book, the two protagonists engage in a spirited series of email exchanges, which begin after Tal naively sends a message in a bottle to the people of Gaza, down the Mediterranean coast.
Now the unusually powerful story comes to the big screen, one of several Israeli films playing in Quebec movie houses this month and next in what has been a boon year for films from the Holy Land.
Co-written by Zenatti and French filmmaker Thierry Binisti, who also directed, the movie was filmed in Israel and within some of its Arab communities, but not – except for exteriors shot from afar – in Gaza, which was off-limits to film crews at the time. One dra- matic scene was, however, shot at Israel’s Erez crossing at the north end of Gaza, one of the only links between Israel and the territory.
The movie has a strong Quebec angle. It was co-produced by Montreal’s Emafilms. Guitarist-composer Benoît Charest (best known for the Oscar-nominated 2003 animated feature Les Triplettes de Belleville) wrote the score, while Sylvain Bellemare (who supervised the sound editing on this year’s Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar) designed the sound.
Buzz has been building for A Bottle in the Gaza Sea since it premiered in France in early February and was wellreviewed. It first screened here Feb. 25 on the final day of the Rendez-vous du cinéma Québécois. With the director present, it screened again Thursday to close the Festival du cinéma israélien de Montréal. Now it starts a full theatrical run – with English subtitles – at Cinéma du Parc and AMC.
For any parent who has a politically aware teenager, or anyone who thinks Israel hasn’t been the same since peacemaking Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, or anyone who’s just interested in a gripping, unsentimental drama with a lot of action and a pacifist message of hope and reconciliation, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea is must-viewing.
The movie begins with a bomb blast – and how.
It comes without warning and is so intense it seems to shake the theatre. It replicates a real-life suicide attack, the one perpetrated by a West Bank student member of Hamas on Café Hillel in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighbourhood on Sept. 9, 2003. Seven people were killed and more than 50 injured in the bombing. One of the victims was a young bride-tobe, killed alongside her father.
In the fictional story told in book and film, Tal is moved by this tragic death of a girl her own age and vows to find out what would compel anyone to commit such a heinous act. So she writes a letter. She addresses it simply to “You,” hoping that the person who ultimately finds it and reads it will be a Palestinian girl who is seeking answers, too.
“If, like me, you think we should learn to know each other, for all sorts of reasons but mainly because we want to get on with living our lives in peace because we’re young, then send me a reply,” Tal writes.
She leaves an email address where she can be reached: bakbouk@hotmail.com – ‘bakbouk’ meaning ‘bottle’ in Hebrew – then puts the letter in a bottle and gives it to her bother, Eytan. He’s a soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces, and has access to a stretch of beach along the border with Gaza. Secretly, Eytan throws the bottle into the sea, and it drifts south.
The reply isn’t long in coming, and it’s not what Tal expects.
“Hi,” writes someone who goes by the pseudonym Gazaman. “I warn you right from the start I haven’t got long dark hair or hazel eyes – and plucked eyebrows, too, maybe? – and all that drivel which went on for half of your letter. I’m more along the lines of a black moustache and very hairy legs ...
“Miss ‘Bottle Full of Hope in a Sea of Hatred,’ I have to inform you that I am a boy,” he writes, concluding several pages later with a bitter ad- monition. “I’m not going to tell you my life story – It’s what you want, but I don’t,” he says. “I’m not some monkey you can watch to see how closely I resemble a human. You’ve got your biology teacher for that. “Goodbye for ever!” He signs his email “Me” and ends with a taunt: “‘Gazaman’ is a lot better than ‘bakbouk.’ Doesn’t it bother you being called ‘bottle’? Maybe you’re that sort of shape ...”
But Tal won’t be put off so easily. She writes him back, compliments him on his writing, asks him to reply, which he does, reluctantly. A correspondence – feisty at first, then more conciliatory – is born. The two find out they have some ideas in common. And Tal learns her interlocutor’s real name: Naïm.
If this were a Harlequin Romance novel, their relationship would blossom into love – love of the forbidden kind, Romeo and Juliet updated for the modern-day Middle East. But to Zenatti’s credit – and the film’s – there is not a shred of sentimentality in the story. The two characters never actually meet and talk. Theirs is simply a meeting of minds, accomplished through words on a screen.
That remoteness makes the story highly original, but to work as cinema the tale needs to be more direct and visual. So to give an idea of the teenagers’ day-to-day lives in Israel and Gaza, Binisti and Zenatti fleshed out the story with scenes of the teens with their families, friends and rivals, including a frightening sequence in which Naïm is kidnapped and interrogated by Palestinian warlords.
In the movie, Tal (Agathe Bonitzer) and Naïm (Mahmoud Shalaby) narrate some of the exchanges in voice-over, a kind of “third way” into the story besides the actual depiction of the two characters themselves. The approach allows the audience not only to understand how the young protagonists think, but also to see how the society they live in affects them.
“How does a young Palestinian live today? That’s something a young Israeli doesn’t really know, and vice versa,” Binisti, a Frenchborn Jew whose parents are from Algeria, said in an interview Tuesday at a downtown Montreal hotel. “The image they have of each other is as soldiers or terrorists. But when they get to know each other like Tal and Naïm, they learn they’re not the cliché they project.
“Each learns that the other is full of questions, has emotions, has a real desire for a future that isn’t the status quo. They discover each other, and their perspective changes.”
So did the actors themselves. Bonitzer, who’s Parisian, had to learn Hebrew for the part. Shalaby, a Palestinian who previously starred in the 2009 inter-ethnic love story Jaffa, had to learn French. (The film also features the Israeli-based Palestinian movie star Hiam Abbass, who plays Naïm’s widowed mother.) “Each actor took the same path as their character,” Binisti said. “That’s what the film talks about – going towards the other person – and they did it.”
The movie is Binisti’s second feature-length film (he has mostly worked in TV, including a miniseries about Vichy France another about the reign of Louis XVI). His association with Montreal goes back to 2003, when he presented his feature debut, the crime drama L‘outremangeur (The Over-eater), at the World Film Festival. The connection was renewed in 2007, when he met EMA Films’ founding director Anne-marie Gélinas at the annual Journées du cinéma du Québec in Paris.
Gélinas had read Zenatti’s novel on summer vacation with her three adolescent girls on the beach in Oka, and loved it. Her middle daughter, Miriam – the “M” in EMA Films – said she absolutely had to make a movie about it. Gélinas hooked up with Binisti, who held the film rights to the book and needed coproducers to help secure funding. France 3 Cinéma and Israel’s Lama Films also came on board.
For its French release, the movie dropped the “Gaza” from the title (there, it’s simply called Une bouteille à la mer), because the reference was thought to be a turnoff to French audiences already over-familiar with Israeli-palestinian conflict from news reports. For Quebec, where such news is covered less voluminously, the “Gaza” stayed in – a laudable choice for its educational value alone.
“It’s a movie that speaks to everyone – it’s not a question of France or Israel or Palestine, it’s a question of human beings,” said Gélinas, whose seven other production credits include the 2008 bittersweet comedy Où vas-tu Moshe?, about the Jewish exodus from Morocco in the early 1930s, and Kim Nguyen’s new African child-soldier drama Rebelle (War Witch), which picked up two top prizes last month at the Berlin film festival and opens here in mid-april.
“The best stories are the simple ones, which by their very simplicity become universal – they bring together the human traits that we all share,” Gélinas said. “And that’s the case with A Bottle in the Gaza Sea.”
Next up: screenings in Israel and the West Bank in June and July. “I’ll be there,” Binisti said. “I’m very curious to see how it will be received. Usually, people are touched by the story; either they discover both sides (Israeli and Palestinian), or they discover the “other” side they didn’t know much about.”
He added with a smile: “You know where people loved this movie? In South Korea! It played the festival there and was bought for distribution. Why? Jews and Palestinians are pretty far from their thoughts, but they do understand the notion of a neighbour who’s so close and yet so far,” in their case, North Korea.
That’s the movie’s appeal – and message. Sometimes the person next to you is the one most far away. Or so it seems, until you connect.