New film born out of lesbian affair between Palestinian and Israeli officer during Gaza War
Hadas Yaron and Samira Saraya in Polygraph
Nirit Anderman writes in Haaretz on 17 November 2020:
The opening scene of Samira Saraya’s short film “Polygraph” takes place in bed. Two women – one a Palestinian Arab, the other a Jewish Israeli – are having passionate sex when a warning siren suddenly interrupts their intimacy. For a second they freeze, but then the Arab woman looks straight at her partner, turns her on her back and takes the controlling position on top. The siren keeps blaring, but the women ignore it and carry on as before.
The couple’s impossible situation in Tel Aviv during the summer of 2014 soon becomes clear. The Arab woman, Yasmine (played by Saraya), is a 37-year-old nurse at a hospital, while Or (Hadas Yaron, shattering her typecasting in ultra-Orthodox roles since starring in 2012’s “Fill the Void”) is a 26-year-old intelligence officer in the Israeli army. She maintains a strict separation between her romance and her military service, and keeps information about her work from Yasmine. One morning, though, she confesses that she’s worried about a polygraph test she has to take in the army: she’s afraid her relationship with a Palestinian woman will be revealed.
Things are more complicated than they seem for Yasmine, too. Her sister, Jahan, who comes to visit from Ramallah, is horrified and furious to learn that Yasmine is in love with a soldier from an army that has just made her life a misery at a checkpoint.
“When I submitted the script to the person in charge of productions at Tel Aviv University, he said, ‘Look, it’s like shooting very heavy artillery at one little bubble: You’ve got a relationship between a Palestinian woman and Israeli woman. The Israeli is also a soldier – and not just a soldier but in intelligence – and there’s also the 2014 Gaza war going on in the background. It’s too much, it will make the story not feel credible,’” Saraya recounts. “When I heard that, I started to laugh. I told him, ‘Believe me, I left out the truly unbelievable scenes.’”
Saraya also wrote and directed “Polygraph,” which is indeed largely autobiographical and based on a relationship she had several years ago. Asked for an example of a stranger-than-fiction scene that actually happened, she mentions how, one time, she gave her officer girlfriend a lift to the Sde Dov air base in north Tel Aviv so she could get some clothes from her room and then come spend the night with her.
Saraya let her girlfriend enter the base with her car, while she waited outside the gate. “Seven minutes later she calls and says, ‘The car won’t start. It’s dead.’ And there she is inside the base with my car, with the air force mechanics working on it. When she told the towing company they had to pick the car up from an army base, there was an awkward pause and then they said it could take six hours. ‘Because most of our drivers are … you know … and we need a Jewish driver,’” Saraya recounts. “I remember that then she started to cry: It was the first time this thing really dawned on her.”
Language as a political tool
Your correspondent first met Saraya almost 20 years ago at the home of a couple of girlfriends. It was probably some political event, there were a good number of women present and at some point, from her seat on the couch, Saraya began reciting a monologue from a Hanoch Levin play. She instantly had everyone mesmerized. The charisma, the acting skill, the flirting with the text and the audience, and the unconcealed delight she took in all the gazes that were focused upon her – it was patently obvious that it was just a matter of time until Saraya, who was working as an oncological nurse at Ichilov Hospital at the time, would ultimately make it as a performer.
Samira Saraya on the set of Polygraph
She grew up in Haifa, one of 13 children, and moved to Jerusalem at 19 to study nursing. She worked as a nurse for almost two decades, occasionally trying her hand at drag shows and performing as a rapper for the kicks. In 2008, she made her cinematic debut in Netalie Braun’s short film “Gevald,” and since then has starred in the television series “Minimum Wage” (2012), Shira Geffen’s 2014 film “Self Made,” which played at the Cannes Film Festival, and in Dana Goldberg and Efrat Mishori’s 2017 indie film “Death of a Poetess,” in which she acted alongside Evgenia Dodina. Saraya also appeared in the play “The Peacock of Silwan,” which earned her an honorable mention at Acre’s alternative theater festival and the Golden Hedgehog award for best actress, has participated in a wide variety of artistic projects, and also performs with the hip-hop group System Ali.
Saraya gave up nursing to pursue a master’s degree in filmmaking, and has also started teaching Arabic (“I do it not just for the income but as a political act. I believe the reality can only change through language,” she says). “Polygraph” won the award for best screenplay at TLVFest two years ago, and the finished short is now competing in this year’s festival – which takes place online this year due to the coronavirus and runs until Saturday.
Since this was her first time directing, Saraya originally thought of casting another actress in the lead role. In the end, though, she had to play the part herself. “I couldn’t find a Palestinian woman who would agree to be a lesbian and sleep with a woman for the camera,” she says. “I’m not judging these actresses, but I’m in a different place. I don’t have such close family ties and I don’t owe anyone an accounting. But other women who are still inside this system are more limited than I am, and that’s OK.”
In addition to the nudity and portrayal of lesbianism, “Polygraph” has a political aspect that could also deter Palestinian actresses. “True, there were some who didn’t come to the audition because the film’s starting point – a relationship between a Palestinian woman and a female soldier, an officer in the Israel Defense Forces – is unacceptable to them ethically. There’s also Yasmine’s male friend in the film, which is a relatively small role, and there was one actor who was a candidate for the role and for two hours argued with me over the phone about the essence of the character, about who those people are. So on a political level, people were very judgmental about the story and the characters.”
Were there moments when these reactions upset you?
“Anyone who creates something wants it to be accepted and loved. But I know they’re going to criticize this film on both sides – and on the Palestinian side, mainly for its starting point: about the chutzpah of bringing such a story to the cinema, because when there’s finally Palestinian representation, it’s about ‘a treacherous woman.’ But that’s exactly what I call ‘sterilizing politics,’ because to me it means judging the character based on external features, instead of examining the character – and what this story comes to tell – in depth.”
The naked body
Nobody can accuse Saraya of not being sufficiently political. In the past decade, she was involved in the LGBTQ direct action group Black Laundry; she helped establish the “feminist-queer movement” Aswat (for LGBTQ Palestinian women); and she’s a familiar figure on the flourishing LGBTQ political scene in Tel Aviv.
“In this film I’m preoccupied with the possibility of our coexistence, with the possibility of loving and conducting such an intimate relationship,” she says. “Look, I could have given up the opening scene, the sex scene, in order to find someone to cast in the role. But for me, it’s a political scene that talks about the space in which we live, about whether we can create a sterile and ‘bubble’-like place in it for ourselves, and about the extent to which our body, our naked body – even when there are no clothes and identifying marks on it – still holds within it the balance of power between us.”
Saraya wanted to give viewers a glimpse into the challenging life led by her and those like her here. “So they can see the extent to which we, as Palestinian women in the LGBTQ community, have to compromise or give in or shed a part of ourselves in order to exist here. I, for example, can’t go out for my morning run on the Jaffa promenade every day without seeing the Etzel Museum [the Etzel, aka the Irgun, was a right-wing Jewish militia in Mandatory Palestine] and everything it represents in front of me. The same thing also happens to me in the space of the relationship between the film’s two female protagonists. On the other hand, I don’t want to say it’s not possible and couldn’t happen.”
Why did you choose this of all the stories from your biography?
“First of all, because it’s really extreme – one of the most radical things I’ve done in my life. And I wanted to examine myself and to process feelings that I didn’t deal with when I was in this relationship, to understand how I survived in a relationship in which my partner took an active part in very serious violence.
“In addition, even if she had been doing any other secret job, there’s something problematic about the fact that you have no idea what your partner does all day. She gets up in the morning, returns in the evening exhausted, and you have no idea what she experienced. You can’t ask, and she’s not allowed to tell you. That profoundly damages the trusting aspect of the relationship. So I was interested in understanding what happened to me there, and what kept me there.”
Did you find an answer to that question?
“She was an officer in air intelligence. We were together for four years, and I have no idea what exactly she did there. We met at the height of Operation Protective Edge on a Hoshen course [an LGBTQ education and information center]. I was then in one of the worst periods of my life emotionally: it was the first time I was really afraid to speak Arabic in the city center; I rarely left the house.
“After that course I met her one evening in Sderot Hen. That was shortly after “Self Made” came out. [The film’s about two women, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, who inadvertently swap lives after a mix-up at a checkpoint.] I told her, ‘I’m here with girlfriends, maybe you’ll come for a beer?’ And she replied, ‘No, I’m flying.’ At first I was really interested, but then I realized she was looking at me with an embarrassed smile. At that moment my jaw dropped. I asked, ‘What, do you bomb?’ There was something apologetic and guilty about her expression. And she said, ‘No, I have the most civilian job on those flights.’
“For me, there was some kind of dissonance in this woman that tells the story of Israeli society in general: between the self-image and the reality. Several months later I asked her directly, ‘Do you think you’re part of the cycle of violence?’ And she said no. Because the violence in which she was involved was sterile: pushing buttons is sterile; that way, you see the spraying [of blood] less. She was a vegan, in favor of LGBTQ rights and involved in humanistic issues. But in her everyday practice, she was violent. It’s like the militaristic Israeli society, which has no doubts, doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t object to anything – simply accepts the situation as is.”
How did your family and friends react to this relationship and now the film?
“The family side is complicated. I can reasonably assume that my family won’t see this film. The relationship was the biggest closet I was in with regard to my family – in other words, vis-à-vis the sister who’s closest to me. She lives in Ramallah, experiences checkpoints and harassment by soldiers. It was harder for me to tell her I was dating a soldier than that I’m a lesbian, and she never looked at me with as shocked and hurt and disappointed an expression as then.
“My friends who see the film encourage me and love me, but it’s wasn’t easy for them either. I have a friend who was wounded in the intifada, got a bullet in his head when he was 12, and suddenly he has to meet a soldier in uniform in my house. It wasn’t easy for all of them to live with me when I was in that relationship, and it’s not easy for all of them to see the film.”
You’ve had several Jewish partners over the years.
“True, but that wasn’t because of some perversion or racism, God forbid,” she laughs. “If you lived in the United States now, would most of your partners be Israelis?”
In other words, it’s a matter of supply and demand in Tel Aviv?
“Yes. If I lived in Jordan, my girlfriends would probably be Arabs. It’s not a matter of…”
Sleeping with the enemy.
“Yes. I’m already fed up with being an Arab woman. I’m tired. Because it makes no difference in what framework or how big I am, the first thing that happens to me when I meet a Jewish woman here – I immediately become an Arab. In relationships with Jewish women, it makes no difference how small and fragile and lost they are, or how big and stable I am: my existence immediately enters some kind of vacuum, shrinks, and only then, slowly but surely, I start to accumulate volume. First of all I’m an Arab, and only afterward do I begin to be the other things.”
Do you feel that on the professional level too? Does being an Arab actress-director in Israel help or hinder?
“Both. In terms of the representation of Arab women in cinema and on television, I’ve had enough of playing a cleaning woman, a bomber, a terrorist, the mother of a terrorist, an inarticulate woman. The offerings are very limited. On the other hand, as an artist, when the Israeli film establishment remembers that this point of view of the Palestinian LGBTQ community is missing and wants to hear it, that can help. When a Jewish-Israeli artist makes a film about Palestinian LGBTQ people, the characters are often limited: They’re usually victims of the society in which they live, and the Jew is the one who comes and rescues them.
“In my film, on the other hand, the point of view is of a strong Palestinian character, who’s not looking to be rescued. So yes, there are some people who want to hear, and I definitely have something to say – and maybe that’s why I can get a platform. But it’s important to understand that I don’t get this only because I’m an Arab woman, but because I’m talented and bring important and beautiful things. After all, if I were only an Arab woman, you wouldn’t be interviewing me now. So I’m not making a financial and spiritual fortune from being an Arab woman, but my Arab-ness definitely has a value that I bring with me.”
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