Happy Holidays

Four interconnected tales of two families in Haifa, one Palestinian and the other Israeli, deliver a universal cry for personal dignity. Filmmaker Scandar Copti examines the tangled web of deceit that arises from the intersection of state institutions, societal pressures and cultural conventions.

While she’s away at university in Jerusalem, Fifi would prefer to hide her private life from her Palestinian family. But when she sustains minor injuries in a car accident, details of her medical records are brought to her parents’ attention. 

For each of the four protagonists’ hopes of making their own decisions are stymied by familial and social demands and expectations. A taxonomy of lies emerges – lies told to maintain the status quo, discomfiting facts left untold, misguided assumptions made about others, received truths absorbed without question. Some are seemingly harmless fibs, others a threat to security. All evince lives lived in fear of judgement.

Set against a backdrop of perpetually fractured Arab-Israeli relations, Happy Holidays could be convincingly read as a critique of the oppression of Israeli Arabs by the state apparatus. Equally, however, it serves as a universal cry for personal dignity. When, at last, the houses of cards collapse and a raw truth is spoken, its emancipatory power – even if perhaps short-lived – is staggering.

– Nicholas Davies

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