According to the UN, nearly 1,000 Palestinians currently living in Jerusalem face eviction at the hands of the Israeli government. Of those permitted housing, less than 10% are Palestinian, despite the fact that they encompass nearly half of the city’s population. It could be said then that Muayad Alayan’s newest feature, Conversation with the Sea, which just premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, is an elegy of the way life once was in the Holy City, long before tyrannical rule and genocide permeated its outer edges. But such contentions would omit the here and now of the work, or the fact that it is far more akin to an elegy of the present, as it were, reminding us perhaps that not enough has changed, that the displaced remain displaced, and the deceased, deceased.
The film begins with presumably real footage of Israeli police brutalizing Palestinian protesters, prompting us to think again to the aforementioned truths. This ultimately informs the premise of Alayan’s film, which follows an aging Palestinian man, Kamel (Kamel El Basha), who is forced by an Israeli court to pay a large debt allegedly accrued by his son who, despite drowning in the Red Sea some two decades prior, has yet to be declared deceased by government standards. The number of vague logical inconsistencies regarding his son’s death serves as the catalyst for Kamel’s investigation into the matter, ultimately leading him into a personal spiral regarding his own grief and regret. In less of a contextual vein, this narrative construction appears reminiscent of the conspiracy-as-grief allegory of Courtney Stephens’ Invention (2024) — a similarly austere but always intriguing portrait of loss and personal rediscovery. Likewise, there are a number of films that Conversation with the Sea could be likened to in that regard, but none remain as committed to bereavement in the manifold sense. Which is to say, Alayan’s focus is not simply one of a lonely man’s struggle, but rather a conjunction of the inanimate anguish resting beneath a city’s grounds and the human suffering sitting just atop its surface.
But Conversation with the Sea, as with Invention before it, must primarily filter this bilateral conceit through its central character’s struggle for emotional reconciliation. As far as this character-driven narrative is concerned, the film only errs in its unrelenting compulsion to deliver on explicitness in place of ambiguity. Lest we forget, though, the previous mention of an inanimate anguish that murmurs just below the Holy City, pervading into the human life within it, and that is precisely why Conversation with the Sea remains a success in spite of its narrative tidiness and commitment to neat answers in place of indefinite questions regarding the past. The film may have a penchant for a certain narrative orderliness, but it shares a similar predilection to a far more inventive grapple with chaos-induced human geography or — to put it more bluntly — the despondency of coming to terms with one’s homeland being violently swept out from under them. Thus, a fascinating paradox emerges: that Conversation with the Sea lends itself to something more fundamentally human when it anthropomorphizes an inanimate city than when it serves as a family drama. Take Kamel’s reading of the words scribed onto the back of a bus seat, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.” Or perhaps when he recalls meeting his wife decades prior, describing the city as “an amusement park… as big as the whole world.”
The film is didactic in that sense — a brutal reminder of how ultranationalism can affect not only an entire people, but a single family, a single person, a single psyche. It implores us, in other words, to remember the Jerusalem of old and the human beings who lived within it. In that regard, Alayan’s work is slightly contradictory: it takes on a kind of formal realism for events that, whilst remaining true, are antithetical to any rational ontological realism. For how could one realistically justify the objective truths of human conflicts in Jerusalem or Gaza, or anywhere for that matter? How could a society liken them to normalcy, hence forcing us to portray them as something naturalistic? These are, of course, much broader strokes to paint for a film that does not seek to beget such questions. But Conversation with the Sea, whether deliberately or not, does epitomize the cinema’s ability to point to the grotesquerie of our ways in the most unvarnished of fashions. The film may exist somewhere within an artistic status quo, but the magnitude of its actual events does not, and it mustn’t ever be so.
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