CANNES.- An intimate documentary about Palestinian transsexual women in Israelfilmed before the current conflict in the Gaza Strip, brings to Cannes the unprecedented portrait of this community of “warriors.”
The filmmaker Yolande Zauberman films the most closed margins of Israeli society, after her documentary about mixed couples (“Would you have sex with an Arab?”, 2011) and the one that addresses cases of pedophilia in Orthodox Jewish circles, “M ” (2018).
“The Belle of Gaza”, presented on Friday out of competition, is set in Tel Aviv, where in one of its streets with trendy restaurants, Palestinian trans prostitutes wait to be “chosen” by the client, whether Jewish or Arab. .
The camera follows Danielle, Nadine and Nathalie as they struggle to get out of prostitution.
Rumors say that one of them arrived “on foot from Gaza.” Another left the streets and, after her transition, she approached Islam and adopted the veil. Nadine, behind her green contact lenses, knows that she will never be able to return as a woman to her Bedouin family, to explain to them that “God created her like this.”
“They are true warriors of their own destiny,” Zauberman tells AFP, in an interview conducted in Paris before the premiere in Cannes.
“Before, trans women were seen as goddesses or demigoddesses. I wanted to give them this place in the film,” adds the filmmaker.
The documentary also mentions the one who managed to reach the “firmament”, Talleen Abu Hanna, 29, born in an Arab-Israeli Christian family from Nazareth, and managed to be Miss Trans Israel in 2016.
internal war
Being Arab, homosexual and trans in the community, “is more difficult than in other places (…) my father had no notion of anything, neither of transidentity nor of homosexuality,” explains Abu Hanna, who was welcomed by a religious Jewish activist who accompanied her, “like a mother”, until her operation in Thailand.
“My dream was to become what I am today,” he summarizes, in an interview in Paris.
From the war “I feel far away, because I lived a war between my body and my soul, and I managed to reach this peace, this (political) situation is difficult for me, and it completely surpasses me,” he says.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, present in the film through the harshness of the authorities in the face of “clandestine” women coming from the West Bank without a work permit, has little weight, compared to the intimate and personal combat that these women experience.
“There is a key in the world that I understood from my first film (“Classified People”, about apartheid, 1988) which is that resistance is in the intimate,” says Zauberman.
Israel, the most liberal country in the Middle East on gay rights, is often accused by pro-Palestinian activists of practicing “pinkwashing” techniques to be perceived as progressive.
“I have nothing to ‘pinkwashar’, this is my life, my true story, I have no other,” Abu Hanna defends himself.
Source: AFP
