Injustice destroys civilisation. The corruption of rulers leads to the ruin of dynasties.
~Ibn Khaldun
The Middle East Film Festival
I'm going to have a go here at talking about some of the Iranian films that I've watched over the last month or two, which are fewer in number than I would have liked. Because I'm rushing into writing this post, somehow driven into it by the madness of war, I can't say that I'm reaching here for a thematic arc, in the same way as I did for instance in my last post. I'm just writing out of urgent need to say something.
Given the title of the film, it's a funny (happy or otherwise, not sure!) coincidence, that I'm writing this post on November 5th 2025, a date familiar enough to readers in the United Kingdom. Many Britons now seem to have no idea any more of the history, mind, and it's a date which needs a quick search on Wikipedia for most of those not native to these islands. There was zero intention of the two things would overlap. The only reason for writing now is a conversation about this film which took place only two days ago.
Purim falls on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar. It fell in late February in the year that I stayed in Jerusalem. There was a big fancy dress party, and then the day after was seemingly a fairly quiet one until my friend from down the corridor came to ask me if I'd heard the news about what had happened in Hebron.
Ziad Doueiri's 1998 film 'West Beirut' was quite the epiphany for me. Having for many years mentally pictured Beirut as a giant urban mantrap, with perfectly good reason given all the news that we were fed about the place throughout the 1980s, it was virtually impossible to visualise the lives of ordinary Lebanese people in the midst of the madness that engulfed them for fifteen years.
Here I'm going to write about a film which is gentle and wistful, occasionally funny, and occasionally sad and touching. The beauty of this film lies in the fact that - despite not containing one single word of dialogue between either of the two protagonists and an Israeli character - there are more than enough references, oblique and acute, to reveal what it's like to live day to day as an Arab citizen in the Jewish State.
Imagine that the chairman of your Neighbourhood Watch is a DJ and mixtape composer with an interest in Tibetan mysticism, who smokes weed and carries a baseball bat around the hood. In characterisations of Israel which break it down into something more complex and less monolithic than 'the Zionist Entity', there are multiple communities which need to be understood if we have any serious intention of healing the gaping wounds of the Middle East.