“Coexistence doesn’t occur between the oppressor and the oppressed. It occurs between two equals,” political activist and comic Noam Shuster Eliassi says in her one-woman present “Coexistence, My Ass!,” which lends its identify to Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares’ biographical documentary. Shot over the tumultuous 5 years between 2019 and 2024, “Coexistence, My Ass!” traces activist-turned-comedian Eliassi’s rise within the comedy world because it parallels the rise in tensions between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories because of settler violence and the election of proper wing politicians to Israel’s authorities.
All through the movie, Eliassi performs her one-woman present for an viewers in a small black field theater. Not like her early punchline-driven stand-up, the present takes a extra long-form storytelling form, a la “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette” or Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” Fares and her editor Rabab Haj Yahya add context to her tales by cross-cutting from her stay efficiency of the present to new footage they filmed of Eliassi along with her household and mates in Israel, in addition to archival footage from Eliassi’s childhood, her viral satirical movies throughout quarantine, and appearances she made as a political correspondent on Israeli tv.
Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and little Farsi, Eliassi was raised by an Iranian-Jewish mom and Romanian-Jewish father, whom she calls “woke progressive leftists,” within the Oasis of Peace (Neve Shalom/Wahatal-Salam), a deliberate neighborhood of Israelis and Palestinians whose purpose was to show coexistence might be achieved. The neighborhood’s hippie-tinged utopian beliefs are broadcast loud and clear by the rainbow-colored arch with a rainbow-colored dove perched on high that welcomes guests to its grounds. As a baby, Eliassi and her Palestinian finest pal Ranin met Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda. As a young person, Eliassi went on a tour round Israel talking about peace. After attending Brandeis on a full journey scholarship for her activism, she took a job on the United Nations.
Described by her mother as a humorous, but deeply critical baby, Eliassi quickly discovered herself drawn to the world of stand-up comedy, quipping she selected to pursue comedy as a method to additional her political profession after seeing Volodymyr Zelenskyy pivot from sitcoms to being elected president of Ukraine. After turning into the primary Jewish performer on the Palestine Comedy Competition, she was invited by Harvard to work on a peace challenge. She selected to develop her one-woman present, “Coexistence, My Ass!” Throughout this course of Fares started filming Eliassi, each on the Harvard campus and following her on a comedy tour throughout the U.S., which was halted throughout the early days of the pandemic. Again in Israel, Eliassi recovers from COVID-19 in a luxurious resort referred to as Resort Corona, the place contagious Palestinian and Israelis “radically” bought alongside.
Over the following few years, Eliassi’s set advanced from subjects like her physique hair to extra politically charged comedy, impressed by the anger she feels watching new tales just like the homicide of Eyad al-Hallaq, the autistic Palestinian who was shot by the Israeli police on his strategy to faculty in East Jerusalem, the rise in settler violence and compelled expulsions masked as evictions within the West Financial institution, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth re-election because the nation’s Prime Minister, regardless of a number of standing prison indictments.
As her profile rises, she begins seeing the widening political divide on-line; she’s both a traitor or a hero. Nothing in between. Throughout protests after Netanyahu’s contentious election, Eliassi encounters loads of Israelis who’re anxious that fascism is threatening their democracy, however only a few who agree that the occupation of Palestine is a part of the identical challenge. One older man violently accosts Noam over her views, calling her a provocateur. Not one to again down, she holds her floor as she replies, “Democracy and equality should not acts of provocation.”
The movie’s closing coda takes a somber flip. After spending the final 5 years heading off questions on her singledom, Eliassi lastly brings a person house to satisfy her dad and mom — on October 6, 2023. The subsequent day, every thing shifts. Eliassi describes all of the individuals she is aware of who’ve been affected by the occasions, each Israeli and Palestinian. Worrying texts fill the display screen as she watches movies of the occasion on-line. “I don’t know the way we’re going to come back out of this,” she says. Later, after the bombing of Gaza begins, she provides a fiery speech, making it clear in her view the nation’s “racist, fascist authorities” took benefit of everybody’s collective grief to escalate the scenario into a complete annihilation of Gaza.
Right here, the documentary strikes past Eliassi’s views on the topic. Not sure learn how to transfer ahead within the identify of peace, she speaks with others in her neighborhood, together with the son of an Israeli peace activist who died on October 7. She asks him if his mom would remorse her work. He replies that “she didn’t work for peace in order that after they come, they’ll spare her. She labored so there’d be no purpose for them to come back.” He provides that her demise proves that she was proper, and that, “If we don’t wish to expertise the tragedies of struggle, we’ve to finish warfare.”
Eliassi additionally checks in along with her household, discovering that her cheerful Aunt Zipi, who loved making jokes about Palestinians prior to now, now says she doesn’t need peace or “something to do with them.” Her mom shares a narrative of a pal who instructed her, “I can’t discover empathy inside me for the children being killed in Gaza.” In an earlier scene, Eliassi and Ranin anxious as a result of they felt the entire nation was shedding its grasp on humanity. Now Eliassi, together with everybody else she speaks with, can see precisely what this numbness in the direction of Palestinian life has wrought.
There may be an abundance of fabric from Eliassi’s life throughout these fraught years, and Fares, Yahya, and co-writer Rachel Leah Jones wrestle to steadiness this hanging footage with that of her one-woman present. The present which, in-person, builds towards its devastating coda, isn’t actually given room to movement the best way it will should you watched it stay. The cross-cutting enhancing deflates the present’s rising stress because it pivots from politically themed comedy to Eliassi’s devastatingly critical closing monologue.
Actually, there are two documentaries right here, every made with a distinct strategy. And whereas they’re each searing fusions of the non-public with the political, the try to meld them collectively doesn’t wholly work, undercutting the momentum of each. Nevertheless, “Coexistence, My Ass!,” stays a compelling entrance row seat to a rustic getting ready to implosion, with Eliassi’s humor and insights performing as a melancholic elegy for a peace that, a minimum of till actual change occurs quickly, may not ever come.
Grade: B
“Coexistence, My Ass!” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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