The Palestinian experience is one defined by misery, trauma and nostalgia — a collection of memories and hopes that strive to achieve a sense of comfort and belonging in a life defined by dispossession and statelessness. When it comes to mainstream Palestinian cinema, such as the works of leading filmmakers like Annemarie Jacir or Elia Suleiman, these themes are explored in very human, nuanced and emotionally powerful ways, but rarely are they blunt or confrontational. Palestinian filmmaker Mona Benyamin, on the other hand, directly challenges how the mainstream and general Palestinian population engage in discourse about Palestinian suffering, history and life under occupation in three short films slated to be screened at Metrograph on Sunday.
‘Trouble in Paradise’
Set in Haifa, “Trouble in Paradise” acts as an homage and, to some extent, a mockery of American sitcoms, employing a “Full House”-inspired title card and opening credits as well as an overbearing laugh track. Where traditional sitcoms often serve as a form of escapism for domestic audiences, Benyamin’s piece directly confronts the socio-political climate of Israeli-occupied Palestine, ultimately exploring humor as a means of coping with generational trauma, pain and dispossession.
Throughout the 2018 short film, Michel and Nahi Benyamin — the filmmaker’s parents — read jokes from transliterated title cards as they perform mundane tasks around their house, with each joke getting progressively darker than the last. It begins with fairly simple comedic beats as Michel and Nahi engage in passive aggressive albeit hilarious discourse about their marriage: “My husband and I had a very happy 20 years. After that, we met.” Their purposefully monotonous delivery accompanies the mundanity of the jokes beautifully, eventually advancing toward more culturally and historically significant material. In providing commentary on Palestinian suffering and systemic oppression under occupation, Michel and Nahi cope by grimly quipping, “Where does an Israeli draw money from? The West Bank” and “Where are parent-teacher conferences held in Gaza? At the cemetery.” Where the film’s initial jokes were delivered in English, the latter half of the film is mostly in Arabic, adding authenticity to the shift in tone.
Under the guise of a dysfunctional sitcom, “Trouble in Paradise” breaks taboo and gets at the heart of why jokes about Palestinian misery, the Nakba and Israel’s military occupation never evolved or entered into the Palestinian mainstream.
‘Moonscape’
Benyamin’s 2020 film “Moonscape” is undoubtedly the most experimental and artistically brazen of the three films, having been conceived from the following premise: It is more possible for a displaced Palestinian to own part of the moon than it is to actually return to Palestine.
Presented as a music video starring Benyamin’s parents once again, the song that accompanies the melancholic, almost noir photography tells the story of Dennis Hope — CEO and president of the Lunar Embassy, which legally sells land on the moon and other other “extraterrestrial real estate.” The song is performed as an Arabic duet between a male and female singer, tracing Hope’s history of founding the Lunar Embassy in 1980 to Benyamin’s own struggle as a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation in search of any way out. The presentation of the film is quite surreal, often cutting back and forth between shots of Michel and Nahi dancing, a musician playing the oud, footage of a perched bird and a computer-generated animation of a dancing alien. The film also employs found footage from NASA archives and screenshots of email exchanges with Lunar Embassy personnel.
Bizarrely constructed, “Moonscape” is meant to be jarring. It is a strange hybrid of experimental filmmaking, surrealism and iconic imagery from the Arab music industry — and all of these elements are in service of a story about nostalgia, belonging and statelessness.
‘Tomorrow, again’
Another dysfunctional parody, Benyamin’s “Tomorrow, again,” released in 2023, walks viewers through a news broadcast that reproduces coverage of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, from 2000-2005.
Again starring Michel and Nahi, the two each perform multiple characters, including broadcast journalists, eyewitnesses and guests on news shows. The film’s presentation is one of fragmentation, with Benyamin weaving through each segment with no clear sense of flow or narrative progression — a chaotic structure that captures the lived experience of a Palestinian living in a constant state of emergency. The film’s performances are remarkably heightened, with the actors exhibiting an exaggerated physicality and going through several emotions within the span of just a few seconds. Throughout the short, they discuss and capture daily catastrophes that transpire in Palestine by means of conflicting testimonies, doppelgangers and a disorienting sense of time.
“Tomorrow, again” captures the sprawling nature of news consumption and witnessing news developments in Palestine, exploring chaos as a byproduct of trauma and oppression.
Mona Benyamin’s films will screen at Metrograph on Sunday, March 16 at 2 p.m.
Contact Yezen Saadah at [email protected].
