We sit down with the director of Happy Holidays, Scandar Copti, for an interview to discuss his newest film and his filmmaking style.
Four interconnected characters are at the heart of Happy Holidays: through them, the film explores the complexities of gender-based discrimination and cultural clashes between the Palestinians and Israelis who share the same land.
The film begins with Fifi’s (Manar Shehab) accident which prompts her mother, Hanan (Wafaa Aoun), to seek compensation as she faces a financial crisis while Fifi is hiding a secret from everyone around her, including her family and Walid (Raed Burbara), a doctor who shows interest in her and is approved by her mother. Happy Holidays also follows Hanan’s son, Rami (Toufic Danial), a Palestinian man from Haifa, who is dealing with his Israeli girlfriend’s change of heart about their unborn child. At the same time, Miri (Merav Mamorsky), a nurse, has a strong opinion on the pregnancy and tries to get involved in it while also dealing with her daughter’s depression.
Happy Holidays has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival where we sat down with director Scandar Copti to talk about his film, his realistic process of filmmaking, and what this movie means today in the current political climate. Read our interview!
Scandar Copti on Telling The Story of Happy Holidays
What inspired Happy Holidays in the first place and how did you think of this story?
Scandar Copti: The way I usually work is, I start with investigating what I call an annoyance, something that annoys me. In this specific case, it started a long time ago when I was in my late teens. I overheard a female family member of mine telling her son: “don’t ever let a woman tell you what to do,” referring to his wife. For me, it was a paradox which seemed interesting: I was fascinated by the logic of it. But then I started to understand where it was coming from. I quickly understood that it has to do with internalizing oppression – and rationalizing it – so we suffer less. And I became very interested in this, and in the idea of choices. Most of our choices are guided by our sense of morality, which is problematic because when we think of morality, we think about it as binary right or wrong, as judges that know it all. But, in fact, all we are doing is defending a narrative which is not ours and was indoctrinated by the forces that be.
Then, I went to an Israeli University, and I noticed that the same thing happens with the militarization of society through my interactions with Israelis with the whole idea of enforcing it through holidays and persecuting people. I was very interested in all those systems that have a very simple structure of rewarding people who join and punishing others who don’t. I’m a storyteller, but mostly I listen. A lot of people tell me a lot of stories, so I collect those stories – even in my first film – and that is a long process of dramatizing them and making them work. In Happy Holidays, these are all real stories that I collected that also fit into these ideas of choices and moralities that I just mentioned. For example, the mothers in the film know that the choices that they make will probably hurt their daughters.
That is a very interesting dynamic. I feel like a lot of Happy Holidays is about the very complicated relationship between mother and daughters. How did you work on creating that in your writing and also in the room with the actors?
S. C.: First of all, I don’t start writing until I realise I know the story. I am not going to talk too much about my personal life, but everything that made me suffer in my life originated from this idea of internal oppression and moral choices; that is what I meant by owning it. This guided me in my writing, as well as my wife. I grew up with three brothers – we are four males – but I have been married for 15 years and through my wife and eldest daughter, who is now 12, I started learning this dynamic in my society. Only then, did I get to engage with that and how me and my wife want to raise our daughter, all of this made an impact in Happy Holidays.
In terms of acting, I work completely differently from the way you would usually do in classical filmmaking. All the people on screen are non-actors and they all originate from real professions. The doctor is a real doctor, that is what he does normally, and [the same is true for] the psychiatrist, the real estate agent, the lawyer… everyone. I chose people based on their profession and their similarity to the characters I’ve written, in terms of personality. I worked with them for a whole year, with [focus] groups based on the professions. For example, I had 30 doctors and I worked with them before choosing Raed, because he was the closest to his character Walid. It was the same with Manar, who played Fifi, and Wafaa who played Hanan. Once I choose my characters, then I tell them: you are with me on this journey.
And then I start to role play in the locations themselves, build their histories together and their past experiences. They almost live in those locations and get to know each other. It is not me talking to them; it’s mostly them interacting with each other. It is both things that are relevant and not relevant to the story like celebrating birthdays, barbecuing, and here and there I inject conflict. For example, I established the relationship between Hanan and her daughter who is a little bit of a rebel and then Hanan puts more pressure on her. We also shoot chronologically and I never give them the script before, we go scene by scene. There is no blocking and not even a boom – everybody is mic’d – and it is a very tiny set with no lights and only two camera people with zoom lenses. It’s very inefficient but what they create is not something I could write; my creativity is too poor to bring this beauty and the richness of every character with their way of talking and moving.
Championing Realism in Happy Holidays
I did want to ask you about shooting on location and the locations that you use, because it adds to this feeling of realism that you talked about. How did you choose the locations and how was it for you to physically be there?
Scandar Copti: I do all my films on location, this is how I did my first film as well. I chose the locations based on the characters I’ve written because I know these two societies so well. And obviously, it’s based on real people, so I try as much as possible to have it physically there. For the Palestinian family, I was very aware of avoiding this poverty porn – I don’t want to use this word, but I have to – I did not want people to watch it and think it was about poor people oppressing each other. So I chose a very established, rich, and educated family to only analyse the cultural oppression. This dictated the setting of their villa and the neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, I gave the people time during those roleplays before shooting to play with the location. For example, they cook in the kitchen, so the mother wanted to put the pans where it made most sense. We also asked them what they wanted us to buy during the cooking scene, they chose to make chicken and vine leaves so we got them what they needed. I didn’t want to impose anything so they brought their own wine, and actually talked at length about it, even if it is not in the film. You see this lunch for two minutes but it was an hour and a half
We also filmed in the hospital where Miri works: that’s her department and her desk, it’s where she has been working for the last ten years. We filmed Walid in his department when he goes out with the ultrasound machine and meets Fifi. We actually tricked him because I couldn’t tell him she was going to come! So I had him do an ultrasound of the heart – he deals with cardiology so that is what he does – and that is how he got surprised. My producers, who are my little brothers, wanted to do it quickly but I said no, let’s take 10 minutes and have him do the ultrasound before so we can trick him. And it was worth it.
Wow. I love that.
S. C.: Yes. And I teach it. I actually teach it every year in London, at the University of Greenwich. I do a 16-hour intensive workshop to teach this method. It’s in November in London and then I do it in Berlin during Berlinale. And now I’m doing it in Dubai. I just did it in Portugal and Hong Kong, and all around the world.
On Portraying Both the Israeli & Palestinian Societies, & What Happy Holidays Means Today
I also wanted to ask about these two societies that we see in Happy Holidays, the Israelis and the Palestinians. Was it challenging to include both and did your personal background play a part in how you portrayed them?
Scandar Copti: I really care about these two societies. What pushed me to do the film is knowing that we have good people on all sides. I believe that people are born good, but they are part of a corrupt system that uses them, we are subjected to forces – like capitalism, self-judgment, and social media – that push us to become who we never intended to be. If we can disengage and look at ourselves objectively, then we can say that we didn’t mean to do this and it is hurting us and others. I also believe that the process of change has to start with empathy but it doesn’t stop there. It needs to go on with proximity. You need to be close to those people, which I am as a Palestinian and citizen of Israel, I am very close to the two societies. Then, you need to do some analysis that I just spoke about and then take action.
For me, Happy Holidays is the action. If I manage to have someone watch my film and say “You know what, I never thought about this. I’m a good human being but somehow, I was lost, it was easier to be instructed what to do than to really think about it.” That’s it. That is my mission. I would do it through film and through talking to you or others, but this is what I’m here for. I’m not here for anything else, really. I’m not doing films for the sake of aesthetics. I’m doing it for the sake of really provoking change because it drives me crazy. thinking about how this happened? How did 400 years of slavery happen? I’m sure that throughout those 400 years, people were good: they loved their kids, they went to church but they enslaved others. How did this work? Now with the genocide in Palestine, how is it working? These are good people. We’re watching everything on our phone but we think that we’re useless. And how is this happening? I’m very, very interested in this. Very much. Especially now.
What do you think Happy Holidays means now? You mentioned the genocide and I wonder if there’s a sort of added value to the film now in this political context.
S. C.: The film was written in 2018. We were unlucky with COVID because we started shooting in 2020 and we stopped after three and a half days of shooting. We lost so much money. And then in 2021, shooting again stopped. We started pre-production, and stopped after a month. And then we shot 2022 in very difficult conditions. Everybody was with a mask and all, it was not easy. So it was before everything that happened [on October 7 that initiated the Israel-Hamas war]. But to me, what happens with the genocide just intensifies what’s been going on worldwide.I will go back to talking about this moral leadership that is missing: all the leaders in the world are not talking about morality or how underprivileged people are getting hurt and how to stop it. Nobody does it. Other forces are pushing and pulling and I am hoping as an artist that Happy Holidays will provoke this conversation about rethinking our values and traditions. I chose to tell the stories of women because I truly believe that nobody’s free until the weakest link, the most oppressed link, is free. We can liberate ourselves but what value does it have or how long will it hold if women are still oppressed or other minorities, other groups, I’m not talking only about women but any oppressed group, right? And in my society, women are the most oppressed, and Palestinians even more.
I also really like that in Happy Holidays, we hear both Hebrew and Arabic. Was that intentional from the beginning? And how did you work that in, if it was?
S.C.: Israelis, they speak Hebrew, and only exclusively Hebrew. And Palestinians speak Arabic, but also Hebrew. And it’s this thing with language and identity, right? Especially when people perceive each other as rivals. And this happens with Fifi’s story in the Israeli school. She’s a Palestinian, and she’s doing her practicum in an Israeli school so she has to speak Hebrew, and she has to celebrate the holidays with them. Palestinians will speak Arabic in between themselves, but also here and there, they will put a word in Hebrew, which I didn’t control [in the film]. This is how these people speak, and I want to stick to this realism, I don’t want to impose anything else.
We’re not perfect. I don’t care about this perfection. In fact, when we’re shooting, I would hear a lot [of comments staying] but it’s ugly. My DP would tell me, “This frame is ugly. Let’s move them.” I would say, listen we can’t move anyone, we don’t move people. And it’s beautifully ugly. That was on day one and then starting from day two and three, we started talking in this language that ugliness is pretty. It doesn’t mean anything, all these standards were imposed. Let’s go back in time to 100 years, and fat people were pretty. This became our aesthetics: it’s not about perfection, not in the language, not in the way things work. What we really intended, in terms of aesthetics, is to create this claustrophobic [environment]. In Happy Holidays, people are locked a lot in a close-up, they are locked into their own truth, into trying to prove something to each other.
Scandar Copti on the Title of Happy Holidays
The film is called Happy Holidays, and we see more than one holiday in it. How did you choose this frame and the holidays? Do they mean anything specific to you and to the film?
Scandar Copti.: Well, I will start with Happy Holidays in English and then in Arabic; it has an added value. But in English, it’s ironic, obviously. We go through Israeli holidays, and Jewish holidays. We start with Purim, which is a story where a Persian king tried to exterminate, to annihilate the Jews. But then what happened is that two characters in the story saved the Jewish people in Persia. And then in Passover, it’s almost the same story, but different characters. It was the Egyptians who wanted to exterminate the Israelites in Egypt and eventually saved themselves. It goes on and on to many other happy holidays that we didn’t cover, and then it goes to the Holocaust, where the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews. And then it’s the war of 1948, the Nakba for the Palestinians, and the establishment of the Israeli state for the Jews, which has the same logic: try to kill us, but to save ourselves. This is part of the indoctrination that every Israeli goes through, but it’s also affecting Palestinians, because it’s on media, it’s everywhere.
And then it’s the war of 1948, the Nakba for the Palestinians, and the establishment of the Israeli state for the Jews, which has the same logic: try to kill us, but to save ourselves. This is part of the indoctrination that every Israeli goes through, but it’s also affecting Palestinians, because it’s on media, it’s everywhere.
So it’s ironic, it’s not really happy, right? In Arabic, there’s an added value to it, which I don’t know if people will get. In Arabic, it literally means “may this be repeated upon you,” meaning that may this day come again and again. If it’s your birthday, it’s like, may this birthday come again and again, may you live forever. If it’s your Christmas, may this Christmas come again and again, so you live forever happily ever after, right? But it also means repeated on you, like repeated for you. I placed it just after the accident [at the beginning of Happy Holidays], so basically we’re repeating the story for you again, but this time from Fifi’s point of view. It’s [an easter egg], nobody will get it but I get excited when I talk about it.
On Scandar Copti’s Future Projects after Happy Holidays
Is there anything else you’re working on, and what can we expect next from you?
Scandar Copti: I want to rest, first of all. During COVID I didn’t have much to do so I started working on a documentary – it’s my first feature documentary – called A Childhood. It’s about children’s rights in the West Bank and now maybe it’s going to extend to Gaza. It’s mostly about child imprisonment and I got my hands on a lot of mobile phone footage by parents usually that filmed their kids getting arrested to take it to court. But usually, they film them up until the point where they go on the military jeep and then they disappear. But when they come back, two NGOs collect testimonies. So, I got also those testimonies and I recreated the testimonies using animation: it’s a combination of mobile phone footage and animation. I did a trailer which turned out beautifully and attracted a lot of funds. But now I want to rest a little bit. I want to take time because I edit my own things and I teach at NYU Abu Dhabi. I felt that I neglected a little bit my family, so I just want to spend more time with them.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Happy Holidays had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2024.
