The character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird famously said that you can’t understand another person until you spend some time walking around in their shoes, and The Sea by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, which opens in Israeli theaters on November 13, puts you in the shoes of Ribhi (Khalifa Natour), a widowed Palestinian father, and Khaled (Muhammad Ghazawi), his 12-year-old son.
They are from a village near Ramallah, and Khaled is excited about a class trip to the beach but is devastated when he is not allowed across the checkpoint due to a problem with his permit. He sneaks across the border on his own, determined to visit the sea, and soon finds himself lost in a place he knows nothing about and where he doesn’t speak the language.
His father, who works in Israel as an undocumented construction worker, sets out to find the boy, despite the risk of being caught and losing his livelihood. It’s a simple, affecting story, every line of which carries the subtext that there must be a better way to live together.
Carmeli-Pollak is an Israeli Jew, while the cast and most of the crew, including the producer, Baher Agbariya, are Palestinians.
The film premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival, where it won an Honorable Mention and several other awards, as well as receiving the Ophir Award for Best Picture, making it Israel’s official selection for consideration for a Best International Feature Oscar nomination. It also won Ghazawi the Best Actor Ophir and Natour the Best Supporting Actor prize, as well as Best Screenplay for Carmeli-Pollak.
Independent film funds
The movie was funded by independently administered Israeli film funds, and its win did not sit well with Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar, who released a statement expressing his outrage and pledging to cut government funding from the Ophir ceremony in the future, although he apparently had not seen The Sea: “There is no greater slap in the face of Israeli citizens than the embarrassing and detached annual Ophir Awards ceremony… Under my watch, Israeli citizens will not pay from their pockets for a ceremony that spits in the faces of our heroic soldiers.”
Not long after Zohar had criticized the film’s Ophir win, a widely circulated petition, signed by over 5,000 entertainment industry figures, among them Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, pledged to boycott any movie that received the support of “Israeli film institutions” because of how Israel has allegedly conducted the war in Gaza.
Their criteria put The Sea squarely into the boycott category, just as the Oscar-nominating committee begins to view international movies to compile its shortlist, to be released in December.
All of this highlights that this isn’t an easy time to be an Israeli director making a film about Palestinians.
Nevertheless, Carmeli-Pollak was upbeat in our interview, speaking about how the film would soon be shown at the Other Israel Festival in New York, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia, and the Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina, the largest film festival in Latin America, and that it has an American distributor, as well distributors in other countries.
Filming had been completed on the movie before October 7, and he was almost done editing it when the war broke out. But throughout everything that happened since, he has clung to the belief that his movie would find an audience, even when its prospects looked dim.
The director, who has made several children’s movies and some political documentaries, said that The Sea grew out of his activism. For years, he has taken part in demonstrations to support Palestinians in the West Bank.
“In meetings with people on the West Bank, it came up all the time, the longing for the sea,” he said. “It happened more than once that people would invite me to come up to their roof and look out, and in the distance, you could see this line that was the sea. It’s the West Bank, it’s not that far.
Problems with permits
“And then there was the whole problem with permits. People were trying to figure out how to make a living, and they would ask if there was some way I could help them get a permit, and some people would come in without permits. And then, I can’t explain how, I had the inspiration for the script about the boy who goes to see the sea, and the father who goes to find him, even though it’s dangerous for him. And I thought, as a filmmaker, of the cinematic potential of the story.”
The main thematic inspiration for the movie, which will be crystal clear to film buffs who see it, is Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief, about a father who needs his bicycle to support his family and sets out to find it with his son when it is stolen.
Carmeli-Pollak had seen that film years ago and watched it again as he worked on the screenplay for The Sea. “And I thought, if this movie still works so well – and it was made in the 1940s and I still cried when I saw it – that it’s not just about that time and place. I didn’t need to know a lot about the situation in Italy at that time to feel what those characters were experiencing. There was something so universal about that story, and I realized I wanted to make something here like that.”
Iranian influence
He was also influenced by the films of the Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, particularly The White Balloon and The Mirror, in which child protagonists are at the center of stories critical of the Iranian government, and where cities are seen from the children’s point of view.
“In The Sea, we get to see the places Khaled sees through his eyes… Many of the encounters he has with people are pleasant; many individuals are warm to him. The problem is not the people he meets, it’s the system. And many of the people living in the system don’t understand how it limits others…
His journey starts in a small village that is very pretty, but we see that the reality is complicated. There’s a demonstration that gets violent, and then he passes across the wall, and he’s in a city that’s bustling, and the people there aren’t aware of what it’s like on the other side.
“That came from my experience of going to demonstrations in the West Bank, and you get back and everything is going on as usual in Tel Aviv, and people are sitting and drinking coffee. It was hard for me to go through these transitions, and I think you can see it in the contrast between the two settings in the film.”
Coming of age
The film also highlights generational differences.
The father came of age in a time when Palestinians were allowed into Israel more freely, and there is a scene in which he visits the Tel Aviv bakery where he once worked and was close to his employers. “The father has spent time in Israel and speaks Hebrew, while the son has only seen Israelis who are soldiers and very violent settlers. The attacks by settlers have been in the news a lot recently, but it’s been going on for a long time… I think anyone who sees the film and has eyes, a brain, and a heart can see that this isn’t a good situation.”
For Carmeli-Pollak, Zohar’s rage over the film’s Ophir win was actually a plus.
“It meant that I didn’t need to bother, when I was sending the film out into the world, to explain that the film doesn’t represent this government; that I’m completely opposed to it. What he said did that work for me.”
In the end, the director said, he wanted people to connect to the story and the characters. “I was just trying to tell a true story. I wasn’t trying to show anyone as a monster or as especially good.
They’re all just human beings… I wanted to show the human side of what’s going on, in a way people won’t find in news reports.”