Egyptian director Mohamed Diab wanted to talk about a Palestinian family drama, he finds himself at the heart of a geopolitical controversy: his film Amira will not go to the Oscars in the end because, say the Palestinians, he “serves the Israeli occupation” in “making fun of the prisoners”.
After several screenings at various festivals in Italy, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, the filmmaker had been campaigning for a month with Jordan, where the film was shot, to represent the kingdom at the Oscars. But this week, cold shower, he announced thatAmira would no longer be broadcast at all.
His feature film shocked. It tells the story of a Palestinian woman born from the insemination of the sperm of her father imprisoned by Israel, a means of bypassing bars that dozens of Palestinian women have used for years. However, she discovers as an adult that the sperm used is in fact not that of her father but of an Israeli jailer, the embodiment of the Israeli occupation.
The controversy surrounding this film has continued to swell in recent weeks on social media with harsh Palestinian reviews. “This movie is disgusting”, corn “it is not a film like Amira which will make us doubt the paternity of our children”, wrote on Facebook, a Palestinian woman, Lydia Rimawi, who recounts having had three children with the sperm of her imprisoned husband. And this thanks to the help of fellow detainees of her husband who managed to get her small vials of sperm, she said, passed through the nose and beard of Israeli soldiers stationed at checkpoints upon their release.
Another Palestinian netizen, Reem Jihad, writes on Twitter that Amira is just one “Israeli scenario without morals”. “This film insults Palestinian prisoners without ever talking about the suffering of hundreds of families of prisoners.”
Faced with an outcry of critics under the keyword “Remove Amira”, Mohamed Diab called for a “spectator commission made up of prisoners and relatives to watch and discuss” the film. “We have taken care to watch the film from A to Z and, after many sessions to observe the details, we reject it altogether”, said Qaddoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, which carries the voice of the more than 4,500 Palestinians detained by Israel. “The team had better forget about this movie once and for all”, he concludes.
For Hamas, the ruling Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza whose hundreds of members are locked up in the prisons of the Hebrew state, this film is nothing but a “service to the Zionist enemy”. Mohamed Diab, he keeps repeating that he presented “clean work that in no way insults the prisoners or the Palestinian cause”.
The question of Israel is regularly controversial in the middle of Arab culture. Officially, most Arab countries do not recognize the Hebrew state and their artists are therefore prohibited from going there.
In 2017, the Franco-Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri was heard by a military tribunal in Lebanon for having shot part of his film. The Attack in Israel. Journalists and activists had demanded an “apology” from him, accusing him of having with his feature film “normalized” relations with the Hebrew state, officially still at war with Lebanon. In Algeria, the writer Boualem Sansal has been strongly criticized for having traveled to Israel to receive a literary prize.
In 2020, four Arab countries recognized Israel – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – joining Jordan and Egypt, the country of Mohamed Diab, who first signed peace with the Hebrew state in 1979.
Amira was funded by Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Its main actresses are Jordanian, including Saba Mubarak, but other roles are held by Israeli Arabs.
In the face of the outcry, the Royal Jordanian Film Committee announced it had withdrawn Amira’s Oscar nomination, citing “the enormous controversy” and saying to have acted “out of respect for the feelings of the prisoners and their families”.
As for Saudi Arabia, which is holding its first major film festival, it has simply deprogrammed it.