‘The Sea‘ (‘HaYam‘ is the original Hebrew title) is the feature film debut of Israeli director and screenwriter Shai Carmeli-Pollak. The author is a documentaries filmmaker and some of his previous films over the past 20 years have been documentaries dealing with different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This time Carmeli-Pollak has chosen to express himself with the tools of a fiction film for which he also wrote the script. It is a film that depicts an episode in the uncomfortable coexistence, under conditions of conflict, between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Israel and in the occupied territories of the West Bank. Based on a well-known and often successful formula – mirroring a complex reality from a child’s point of view – the film fails to avoid all the clichées, but it nevertheless creates an interesting and emotional human landscape. The film won several Ofir awards (the Israeli equivalent of the Academy Awards) and will represent Israel (despite the lack of support from the authorities and the Ministry of Culture) in this year’s edition of the Academy Awards competition for best foreign film.
The hero of the film is Khaled, a 12-year-old boy, a student in an Arab village in the occupied territories. He is an orphan of his mother and, together with the other three children in the family, is raised by his grandmother. The family is supported by his father who works illegally in Israel. His school organizes a trip to the sea, a permitted activity, but conditional on approvals and passing security checks between Israel and the territories. On the day of the trip, at the checkpoint, it is discovered that the boy did not have the approval to cross the border and he is taken off the bus on which his classmates continue the trip. Khaled decides to realize his dream of reaching the sea at all costs. He illegally crosses the demarcation wall between Israel and the territories and sets off alone to search for the sea. The world he arrives in is completely different from that of his village. Khaled does not know the language, does not understand the rules and is – consciously or not – in constant danger of being stopped and arrested for illegally crossing the border. Contact with the world and people on the other side of the wall will hold many surprises, and the sea is as close geographically as it is distant as a symbol.
The greatest quality of ‘The Sea‘ is the authenticity of the way in which the meeting between the two worlds is portrayed. It feels that the author of the film comes from the world of documentary films and that he knows his material well. ‘The Sea‘ can be seen as a metaphor for the tragic and schizophrenic situation in which two communities, two peoples claim the same territory as their homeland. When they do not violently confront each other, they try, with no chance of success, to ignore each other. Ignorance, however, leads to fear, and when contact becomes inevitable, everything seems to happen like a dance with fire on a powder keg. Muhammad Gazawi – the child actor who plays the role of Khaled – is formidable, and his eyes full of sadness and frustration will follow the spectators for a long time. The drama of the father searching for his son in a world that looks at them with suspicion is excellently brought to the screen by Khalifa Natour. The rest of the cast is completed by non-professional actors, who rather live their characters on screen than act in the film. The human encounters, full of tensions, but not without humor, seemed very inspired to me. The main minus of the film lies, in my opinion, in the too rhetorical and repetitive split of the characters. A film like ‘The Sea‘ creates emotion through the sensitivity and the authenticity with which it reflects an aspect of a complicated reality from a specific point of view at a given moment in time. Informed viewers know that this reality is complex both in terms of facts and history. Many other facets and episodes can be the subjects of other films.