Let It be Morning -- a new film by Eran Kolirin

The new award-winning feature film, Let It Be Morning, directed by Eran Kolirin, based on a novel by the well-known Israeli Palestinian writer, Sayed Kashua, is a biting political satire which won the Israeli Ophir award this year as best film and therefore will be Israel’s representative to the Oscars in the category of foreign films.  Filmmaker Eran Kolirin won this award once before with his film The Band’s Visit, but the film was rejected due to the fact that it spoke mostly English and therefore couldn’t be considered a foreign film. Let It Be Morning was in the newspapers last spring when it was chosen to be screened at Cannes, but was boycotted by the Palestinian cast because they did not agree that the film should be considered an Israeli film.

The film is about an Israeli Arab man, Sami, who works in high-tech in Jerusalem.  He is married with a son.  After attending his brother’s wedding in the village where he grew up, he finds the road back to Jerusalem has been closed, and he is stuck, not able to return home to Jerusalem, to his job, to his Jewish lover, or to his life.

Although the story is imaginary since Israeli Arab villages don’t have the roads closed and the village electricity turned off, it does however reflect a lot of reality, especially the complexity of life in the occupied West Bank.  The story is about an ongoing closure, the road out of the village is blocked for an unspecified reason, the electricity to the village has been turned off, and there is no food left on the shelves in the grocery stores.  Also, there is a secondary plot which does reflect the contemporary reality within Israeli Arab villages – the head of the town council runs the village like a hoodlum and as a result there is corruption and violence within the social fabric of the village.

Checkpoints have been the focal points of many Israeli films in the past.  Here the tightening checkpoint is part of the absurdity of the story. In fact, one of the soldiers who sits at the checkpoint is both friendly and aggressive, both eager to do his job and lazy, a sleeping serpent, so to speak.

This film, which is a bit like theatre of the absurd, also conveys a message about the inter-connection between the Palestinians within Israel who are citizens of the state of Israel and Palestinians of the West Bank who live under military occupation since 1967. Some of the West Bank Palestinians, who work in Israel, often sleep in Israeli Arab villages, which poses a dilemma for the locals who are citizens of Israel, and who sometimes harbor their cousins illegally.  This film cleverly portrays some of the impossible dilemmas of Israeli Arabs, who are in a double bind—how can they be loyal citizens of the Jewish state while maintaining their commitment to Palestinians under occupation. This puts them in psychological occupation.  It should be noted that Sayed Kashua himself found life so absurd here that he no longer lives in Israel.  He has moved to the United States.