The Quebec City Film Festival (FCVQ) opens Wednesday with a program that is more political and committed than ever. In keeping with this “citizen” shift undertaken by the general director, Hugo Latulippe, and the director of programming, Helen Faradji, the documentary I Shall Not Hatepresented as a Canadian premiere, promises to make an impression in this year of war in the Middle East.
The film traces the journey of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Gazan doctor who worked in Israel. He takes his name from the autobiographical story he published in 2011 (I will not hateRobert Laffont), international bestseller and translated into around twenty languages.
A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Abuelaish was born in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and now lives in Toronto. Trained at the University of London and Harvard, he is the first Palestinian doctor to be appointed to an Israeli hospital and to have treated both Palestinian and Israeli children.
A long-time peace activist and critic of both the Palestinian and Israeli governments, Dr.r Abuelaish lost three of his daughters and a niece in an Israeli bombing of his home during the 2008-09 Gaza war, days after he denounced such strikes in the media. But the Netanyahu government, sued by the Dr Abuelaish has consistently denied any causal link between his media appearances and the attack on his home, citing security concerns that experts have deemed misleading.
Distress Live
It is also thanks to his media appearances that Izzeldin Abuelaish has acquired international notoriety. In what turns out to be the most powerful scene in the documentary, we see one of the most chilling television moments ever recorded: immediately after his house is bombed, the Dr Abuelaish calls a journalist friend who is doing a live newscast on TV. The journalist interrupts him to have the doctor on the phone. His distress is so great that it sends shockwaves through Israel, prompting the Jewish state to declare a ceasefire the day after.
“There was a great sincerity and a deep sense of helplessness in his testimony that instantly moved me,” says Tal Barda, the American-Israeli director of the documentary. “It was through that television segment that I first became aware of him, but it wasn’t until years later, as he was working through his legal battles against the Israeli state, that I decided to make a film about him,” she continues. “His story is so inspiring that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been brought to the screen before.”
The undertaking was not easy, however, the filmmaker admits: “At first, I had a lot of trouble gaining his trust. It was only after long discussions that he agreed to film the testimonies of his family members. Several of them recounted their memories of the bombing of their house for the first time in front of a camera.”
Tense context
The film crew visited the doctor in Toronto and then followed him to the Gaza Strip in 2021, during his final hearing against the Israeli military before the country’s Supreme Court.
All of the footage was shot and edited before October 7, 2023, the outbreak of the current war between Israel and Hamas. However, Barda “felt compelled to add a sequence at the end to talk about it.” It reveals that in the first few weeks of the war alone, 22 members of D’s family were killed.r Abuelaish died in Israeli strikes.
“Of course, the doctor is more pessimistic today, but he continues to encourage a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. It’s admirable,” says the director. Based in Tel Aviv, having lived in the United States and France, she says she supports the doctor’s calls for calm and does not necessarily defend an Israeli point of view: “I refused to be financed by the State of Israel or by Palestinian organizations. That’s why we opted for an international co-production model and we work with Quebec producers.”
In fact, Paul Cadieux and Maryse Rouillard, from Filmoption International, which is distributing the film, are co-producers alongside Frenchwoman Isabelle Gripon. Nearly a year after October 7, 2023, the context remains explosive for distributing such a feature film. On social networks, Internet users were particularly surprised by the humanist statement of the Dr Abuelaish, as the death toll in Gaza passed 40,000 last month.
Helen Faradji, programming director of the FCVQ, the first Canadian festival to present I Shall Not Hate After a premiere at the prestigious CPH: DOX in Copenhagen in March, he nevertheless defends his selection: “The film embodies our vision of cinema as a way of thinking about the major issues of our time.”
“Without taking a political position, he makes us aware of war through the eyes of the Dr Abuelaish, whose mission as a caregiver goes beyond conflicts and massacres. His story is exemplary.
Competition returns to the FCVQ
I Shall Not Hate (English version ofA long road to peace) will be presented Thursday at the FCVQ. The film will be released later in October, on a date yet to be confirmed.
Olivier Du Ruisseau is in Quebec at the invitation of the Quebec City Film Festival.