‘Coexistence, My Ass!’: Sundance Review

Dir: Amber Fares. US/France. 2025. 95mins

Israeli comic Noam Shuster Eliassi finds humour within the darkest of locations. Amber Fares’ rousing, hard-hitting documentary charts Eliassi’s journey from UN diplomat to stand-up comedian, exploring a life championing the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians. Sharp-witted, sympathetic and illuminating, Coexistence, My Ass! efficiently runs the gamut from hilarity to heartbreak. The movie’s recent perspective on current occasions within the Center East and their emotional influence ought to readily appeal to competition programmers and distributors following its Sundance World Cinema Documentary competitors premiere.

Charts the way in which Eliassi’s story is inextricably linked with Israel’s historical past

Lebanese Canadian filmmaker Fares, whose earlier movies embody Velocity Sisters (2015), opens the movie in 2019 with Eliassi at Harvard College, attending courses and writing comedy as a part of a Initiatives For Peace scheme. A snappily edited sequence runs by way of her adolescence and the elements which have formed her view of the world. Her mom is Iranian Jewish and her father is Romanian Jewish and he or she classifies each of them as “woke progressive leftists”. She spent her childhood in Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam, the ‘Oasis Of Peace’ co-operative overlooking the Latrun valley the place Jews and Arabs lived as equals.

Coexistence and mutual respect have been central to her life. She learns to talk Hebrew and Arabic and stays shut friends along with her Arab childhood good friend Ranin. By the years we see her presenting flowers to celeb guests, together with Hilary Clinton and Jane Fonda, assembly the Dalai Lama, turning into a peace activist after which a consultant to the United Nations. She is a charismatic, ebullient character. Seeing “Jewish comic” Volodymyr Zelensky develop into President of Ukraine partially impressed her transfer from activist to humorist.

Eliassi’s act is the spine of Coexistence, as we watch her utilizing her personal experiences to problem and provoke audiences. Her vitality and positivity are extremely interesting, suggesting there’s additional potential for a documentary that simply focuses on her act. Woven across the performances is a diary of life-changing moments, from the pandemic in 2020 when she returned residence to Israel and confinement within the ‘Resort Corona’, to the rising tensions she witnessed because the far proper gained electoral favour and political affect.

Coexistence charts the way in which Eliassi’s story is inextricably linked with Israel’s historical past. A profession in comedy requires bravery when she turns into an alternate voice ready to talk reality to energy in her act, on tv and on social media. She learns that the one manner she might be true to herself is to be genuine in her comedy, whatever the price. She is adored and vilified in equal measure, steadily labelled “an enemy of the state”.  All through, the digital camera turns into a confessional as she offers voice to her doubts, disappointments and fears in regards to the future. In some respects, Coexistence stands alongside the Oscar-nominated No Different Land (2024) in the way in which it gives vivid private testimony in regards to the every day realities of Israeli-Palestinian lives.

Eliassi finds humour a consolation and weapon. Her household’s obsession with when she may meet a pleasant boy and calm down is a working joke that even surfaces throughout her grandmother’s funeral. The Hamas assaults of October seventh 2023 change all the things. Attitudes rapidly harden and desires of coexistence are forged apart. Eliassi feels that each one hope has gone. The movie doesn’t shrink back from that sense of despair, and Eliassi’s lifetime dedication to creating a greater world render it all of the extra heartbreaking.