In Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass!, comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi takes the stage, explaining how her childhood in a mixed Jewish-Palestinian village in Israel has given her a take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that’s both nuanced and unique. Her act isn’t always the same based on her audience, but the convictions she has about speaking up for what she believes is right – even if it’s controversial – remain consistent and a driving force in her activism.
Awards Buzz spoke with Fares about the history of her relationship with her subject:
“Noam and I are actually old friends. I’ve known her for a really long time. I lived in the West Bank in Ramallah for quite a few years. I was making my first film, Speed Sisters, and at the time, Noam was working at the UN. We had a lot of mutual friends and met that way. Then at some point, I left Palestine, she left the UN. I started to see that she was putting jokes on Instagram, and that she was doing all these things around comedy on TV, and I was like, what is she doing? I thought she was working at the UN. Anyways, when she ended up getting a fellowship to develop her one-woman comedy show at Harvard, we reconnected. That’s how it all started.”
She shared the challenges of needing to find an alternative way to get the movie out to audiences:
“Like so many films on this topic, we haven’t received distribution, just in the US. We have in Europe. We are currently self-distributing. Right now, we are opening at the IFC in New York, and we’ll play in limited theaters in LA and San Francisco, Houston and Detroit in the next couple of weeks…As a filmmaker, you think that it takes five years to make a film, you’re constantly trying to raise money. It’s such a hard process just to make the film, and then, at the other end of it, to have to start all over again and go through this distribution element of it. It’s a lot, but I am hopeful that the film will meet audiences and that people will find it.”
Coexistence, My Ass! is now playing in select theaters.
