Maha Haj, born in Nazareth in 1970, is a Palestinian filmmaker and screenwriter. She graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in English and Arabic literature. Her cinematic experience was derived from her work as an artistic designer in the productions of The Time That Remains by Elia Suleiman, The Attack by Ziad Douairi, as well as On the Hill by Rafael Natjari.

She wrote and directed the short film Oranges (2009) and the documentary Behind These Walls (2010). In 2015, she shot her first feature film Personal Affairs, which was critically acclaimed and was selected in the 2016 Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection Un Certain Regard. The film also won the Haifa Film Festival’s Best Feature Award in 2016 and the Mediterranean Film Festival of Montpellier’s Critics’ Award, among others.

Her film Mediterranean Fever, screened in this year’s festival, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival on 25 May 2022, where it won the best screenplay award. It was Palestine’s entry for Best International Feature at the 2023 Academy Awards.

Against the background of the Palestinian community of Haifa, in a poor neighborhood, an unbreakable friendship emerges between two men with unbridgeable differences but also invisible, unexpected similarities. On the one hand, Walid (Amer Hlehel) is a father who suffers from depression and the inability to find inspiration to satisfy his old dream of writing. The digital pages on the computer screen remain blank until he meets his noisy but mysterious neighbor Jalal (Ashraf Farah). Complete opposites in their temperaments, one carrying a persistent inner tension while the other displaying an exuberant effusiveness, the two come from completely different worlds. Jalal makes a living by committing petty crimes, which fascinates Waleed enough to not only start seeing him regularly, but also to eventually ask him for a favor that pushes both of them to their limits. What follows takes the form of an in-depth character study, where the notions of morality and injustice are so entangled that they resemble an unsolvable Gordian knot. Its solution inevitably invites the use of unrelenting violence, which director Maha Hajj handles with sharp precision and seriousness, managing to depict her characters' stakes as elusive, yet effortlessly human existential issues. The film won the screenplay award in the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival (2022).

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Yannis Kantea-Papadopoulos

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The texts have been produced by the network Filmmakers for Palestine gr.
*We consider Filmmakers to be every person who designs, implements, analyzes and teaches cinema: from editors to assistant directors, from lighting technicians to film critics, from viewers to programmers. A film is created by every gaze that shapes it.

Editing & Translation Team: Sofia Grigoriadou, Christina Phoebe, Maximillien Luc Proctor, Sophia Thomopoulos