Director Basil Khalil wanted to portray Gazans as people, not victims, persevering with Discovery title A Gaza Weekend as world events took a familiar turn.
Basil Khalil’s debut feature has taken art imitating life to an extreme. A Gaza Weekend is a comedy that follows the outbreak of a deadly virus, leaving Israel in lockdown and Gaza the safest place on earth, thanks to the Israeli blockade. Two-thirds of the way through his film’s shoot — in and around Haifa, Israel, which doubled for Gaza — the pandemic took grip and filming was shut down.
“We had bought all these masks and alcohol gel props, and then Covid hit. There were none left in the country but we had boxes and boxes,” recalls Khalil, whose film makes its world premiere on September 10 in TIFF’s Discovery section.
The production shut down for an entire year. Filming switched from Israel to Jordan, after Israel took a hard line against UK residents entering the country, which ruled out Khalil, the film’s producer Amina Dasmal and star Stephen Mangan, all UK-based, from returning to set.
Covid-19 was just one of the hurdles faced by Khalil as he tried to get his debut feature off the ground. Born and raised in Nazareth, Israel, to a Palestinian father and British-Irish mother, Khalil grew up in an Evangelical Christian household, where television was not allowed. He would sneak to his neighbour’s house and devour series like MacGyver and films starring Bruce Lee.
He left Israel for Scotland to pursue film studies, and after undertaking but not completing a masters in scriptwriting at Edinburgh’s Screen Academy Scotland, moved to London to work in TV in the mid-2000s.
He began writing A Gaza Weekend in 2009, when swine flu was a hot topic, and developed it at the 2010 Rawi screenwriters lab in Jordan, run by the Royal Film Commission of Jordan in consultation with the Sundance Institute. Khalil also received a development grant from Doha Film Institute in 2011.
A largely Arab-language comedy, set in the Gaza Strip, proved a difficult pitch. “I was trying to raise funding,” Khalil recalls. “Financiers in Europe and the Middle East are not interested in something that diverges from what they’re used to. If I wanted to make the film about suffering, it would have been super easy to do.”
Building profile
The success of Khalil’s 2015 short Ave Maria — about five nuns living in the West Bank who are confronted with a stranded Israeli settler family — began to change his fortunes. The film premiered in Cannes and received an Oscar nomination in the best live-action short category.
The filmmaker had already briefly met United Arab Emirates-born producer Dasmal in Cannes, co-founder with executive producer Robin Fox of Alcove Entertainment, an outfit based in the UK and UAE that produced Richard Ayoade’s The Double. Dasmal was transfixed by Ave Maria. “I loved it and stalked Basil, basically,” says Dasmal, who is also working with Khalil on his next project, a dark comedy TV series set in Europe.
Dasmal joined the feature as producer, and funding started to fall into place. Support came from the British Film Institute, Film4, Beirut-based Arab culture fund AFAC and private equity through Alcove. Sales agent Protagonist Pictures came on board prior to the shoot (Dasmal had a pre-existing relationship with Protagonist, which had repped The Double).
Khalil used much of the same Palestinian cast and crew from Ave Maria for his feature (the nuns pop up again in A Gaza Weekend’s opening scene). Palestinian actress Maria Zreik stepped from the short to the feature, and the key cast is rounded out by Mangan, who was only confirmed three weeks before the start of filming, Adam Bakri, Mouna Hawa, and Loai Nofi.
While the feature is a comedy, in which the worlds of a UK journalist and his Israeli girlfriend collide with the residents of Gaza, Khalil is acutely aware of the harshness of life in the territory. “The absurdity of this open-air prison, the occupation and the suffering the people of Gaza go through,” sighs Khalil. “They don’t get shown as humans [in the media]. If you were to see them as humans, you wouldn’t accept what’s going on.”
Khalil set out to use comedy to portray the people of Gaza in a multidimensional way. “That’s also not something we’ve seen from Gaza. In the mainstream media, they’re seen as a news item.”
But will the people of Gaza get to see the film? “I don’t think [the feature] would be approved by Hamas [Gaza’s ruling Palestinian militant group], at all. But don’t worry,” smiles Khalil, “I have no doubt the Gazans will find a way to see it. They’re ingenious.”
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