‘Coexistence, My Ass!’: Sundance Review

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

Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi finds humour in the darkest of places. Amber Fares’ rousing, hard-hitting documentary charts Eliassi’s journey from UN diplomat to stand-up comic, exploring a life championing the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians. Sharp-witted, sympathetic and illuminating, Coexistence, My Ass! successfully runs the gamut from hilarity to heartbreak. The film’s fresh perspective on recent events in the Middle East and their emotional impact should readily attract festival programmers and distributors following its Sundance World Cinema Documentary competition premiere.

Charts the way Eliassi’s story is inextricably linked with Israel’s history

Lebanese Canadian filmmaker Fares, whose previous films include Speed Sisters (2015), opens the film in 2019 with Eliassi at Harvard University, attending classes and writing comedy as part of a Projects For Peace scheme. A snappily edited sequence runs through her early life and the factors that have shaped her view of the world. Her mother is Iranian Jewish and her father is Romanian Jewish and she classifies both 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 where Jews and Arabs lived as equals.

Coexistence and mutual respect have been central to her life. She learns to speak Hebrew and Arabic and remains close pals with her Arab childhood friend Ranin. Through the years we see her presenting flowers to celebrity visitors, including Hilary Clinton and Jane Fonda, meeting the Dalai Lama, becoming a peace activist and then a representative to the United Nations. She is a charismatic, ebullient personality. Seeing “Jewish comedian” Volodymyr Zelensky become President of Ukraine partially inspired her move from activist to stand-up comedian.

Eliassi’s act is the backbone of Coexistence, as we watch her using her own experiences to challenge and provoke audiences. Her energy and positivity are highly appealing, suggesting there is further potential for a documentary that just focuses on her act. Woven around the performances is a diary of life-changing moments, from the pandemic in 2020 when she returned home to Israel and confinement in the ‘Hotel Corona’, to the growing tensions she witnessed as the far right gained electoral favour and political influence.

Coexistence charts the way Eliassi’s story is inextricably linked with Israel’s history. A career in comedy requires bravery when she becomes an alternative voice prepared to speak truth to power in her act, on television and on social media. She learns that the only way she can be true to herself is to be authentic in her comedy, regardless of the cost. She is adored and vilified in equal measure, frequently labelled “an enemy of the state”.  Throughout, the camera becomes a confessional as she gives voice to her doubts, disappointments and fears about the future. In some respects, Coexistence stands alongside the Oscar-nominated No Other Land (2024) in the way it provides vivid personal testimony about the daily realities of Israeli-Palestinian lives.

Eliassi finds humour a comfort and weapon. Her family’s obsession with when she might meet a nice boy and settle down is a running joke that even surfaces during her grandmother’s funeral. The Hamas attacks of October 7th 2023 change everything. Attitudes quickly harden and dreams of coexistence are cast aside. Eliassi feels that all hope has gone. The film doesn’t shy away from that sense of despair, and Eliassi’s lifetime commitment to creating a better world render it all the more heartbreaking.