There is a moment deep into “Coexistence, My Ass!” — director Amber Fares’ heartrending, trenchant, often side-splittingly funny documentary about Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi — when a fellow comic lobbies Eliassi to soften her barbed political comedy in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. “Our mission as comedians is to bring people together. To unify,” her friend insists.
“My goal is to voice resistance to this insane show of force that has swept everyone up blindly,” Eliassi testily replies. It’s an exchange that reveals the moral clarity — and not inconsiderable force — behind her own response to Israel’s overwhelming retaliatory onslaught against the Palestinian people.
“Coexistence, My Ass!” nevertheless illustrates how deeply committed Eliassi is to bringing people together, laying bare her conviction that behind the inherited political wisdom that Israeli-Palestinian peace is too complex, there lies a “painfully simple” reality that there is no alternative. The film, described by Variety’s Tomris Laffly after its Sundance premiere as an “urgent, eye-opening and enormously compassionate documentary,” travels to the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival this week, where it plays in the international competition.
Following Eliassi across five turbulent years, bookended by the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Coexistence, My Ass!” revolves around a 2024 performance of the comedian’s titular stand-up set at a club in Montreal. In it, Eliassi dissects a word that’s been endlessly bandied about in Middle Eastern peace talks to highlight the hypocrisy of what she describes as a “feel-good industry rather than a lived reality.”
“How can we talk about coexistence when the Palestinians…are still being denied the right to exist?” she asks, delivering one of the movie’s more stinging lines. “Coexistence doesn’t happen between the oppressor and the oppressed.”
Eliassi was raised by parents she describes as “woke progressive leftists” — “the thing that Israelis hate the most,” she tells Variety — growing up in the little village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (“Oasis of Peace” in Hebrew and Arabic), a cooperative community founded by Israeli Jews and Arabs in the 1960s. It’s the only place in Israel, she says, where Palestinian and Jewish people have willingly chosen to live side by side, and it’s there that she learned to move freely between languages and cultures, the product of a shared dream of peaceful coexistence. (“All the kids in the village were basically being groomed to win the Noble Peace Prize,” she quips in the film.)
She eventually attended Brandeis University, where she studied international relations, and later landed a job with the United Nations, working toward building a lasting peace in the Middle East. Ultimately, however, she found her calling not in the “peace industry” but on stage, where her unique upbringing and biting comedic sensibilities found a more accommodating — and perhaps, as she takes pains to argue, necessary — home.
“With peace building and activism, I can influence maybe 20 people or 200 people,” Eliassi says. “But when I make a really good joke…and it goes viral, it can reach 20 million people. I can’t deny the power of comedy.”
In 2019, Eliassi was invited to Harvard University to develop what would become her “Coexistence, My Ass!” comedy show. It was during that time that she reconnected with Fares, a Canadian filmmaker who spent nearly a decade living in the West Bank, where she met Eliassi while shooting her documentary “Speed Sisters,” about an all-women racing team competing in the Palestinian enclave. At the time Eliassi was still working for the U.N., and Fares recalls how at social outings, the young aid worker moved easily between different circles, switching fluidly between Hebrew and English and Arabic.
“She really breaks down those barriers,” Fares says. “There’s nothing false about her when it comes to her speaking Arabic and understanding the Palestinian culture and the Palestinian struggle in a way that I feel is very authentic and very unique.”
“Coexistence, My Ass!” was initially conceived as a short film following Eliassi as she performed on U.S. college campuses during the 2020 presidential election. At the onset of the pandemic, however, Eliassi returned to Israel, where after contracting COVID-19 she was quarantined with several hundred Palestinians and Jews, “radically getting along” in what she affectionately refers to as “Hotel Corona.” Fares pitched the idea for a short film about that experience to Al Jazeera; in the end, she broadened the scope of her film and decided to follow Eliassi for several years, not only charting her rise to viral celebrity but inadvertently “documenting the run-up to Oct. 7,” after which “the film took on a level of relevancy that it didn’t have before,” says the director.
In the difficult days and weeks that followed, comedy became the least of Eliassi’s concerns. “There wasn’t any capacity for me to be funny again,” she says. “It took me a long time to pick myself up…[and ask], ‘Is it okay to laugh? Is it okay for me to make fun of things?’” The turning point came several months later, when she was performing at a theater in Jaffa with a Palestinian spoken-word artist. “I saw the reaction of the audience, of people who are at home, feeling very silenced, feeling scared,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Oh my God, people really need some oxygen. People really need laughter.’”
Even before Oct. 7, Eliassi’s pointedly political routine put her at odds with Israel’s comedy establishment. “I see all these comedians that can just make jokes about random shit, and they don’t even think that they need to talk about what’s going on here,” she says. “They don’t feel even the slightest responsibility to speak about the harsh issues that I’m speaking about.” After Israel launched its invasion of Gaza, many comedians began performing at military bases to boost soldiers’ morale, something Eliassi compares to “participat[ing] in the war machine with their comedy.”
Noam Shuster Eliassi considers herself both an activist and comedian.
Courtesy of Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
The climate for her brand of humor has hardly improved in the nearly 18 months since. “I am fearful, post-Oct. 7, to keep saying the same things that I was saying before, because there is much more silencing of people like me,” she says. “Not to [mention] my Palestinian friends who are arrested for liking posts on social media.”
Among them are Arab Israeli comedian Nidal Badarny, who was arrested on Feb. 24 on suspicion of “disturbing the public order” because of jokes he made in recent weeks about the hostages taken by Hamas. The comic, who was released several hours later without charges, blamed an “incitement campaign against me by extremist racist groups” that also led to two of his comedy shows being canceled by the Israeli police.
Eliassi nevertheless continues to perform, and she continues to believe in a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, insisting, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” Speaking to Variety from Jaffa the morning after the Academy Awards, she’s buzzy over the triumph of “No Other Land,” the Israeli-Palestinian Oscar winner for best documentary. She counts the directors Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor among her friends — “It’s amazing what they did,” she says — and she was up before dawn to watch the ceremony’s live broadcast from the Dolby Theatre.
It’s an example of Eliassi making literal what Fares describes as her “tireless” work ethic, both as an activist and comedian. “I’m protesting, I’m posting. I’m trying to do all the shit that we tell ourselves might make a difference, and it’s so difficult,” Eliassi says. “It’s going to be a very long-term commitment. It is already for me a long-term life commitment. Not just this film, not just one routine, not just one protest.
“There is really no other alternative than to keep on fighting for this very simple and basic truth,” she continues. “We’re fighting for justice and equality, because there is no other way that both people can survive on this land without equality and justice. It’s the only thing that will lead to safety and freedom.”
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival runs March 6 – 16.
