The protest is loud and powerful: “This film is an insult,” complains the Palestinian Minister of Culture, Atef Abu Saif. Various activist groups in the West Bank have ruled that it is tarnishing the honor of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. And Hamas rumbles from the Gaza Strip that this strip only serves the “Zionist occupiers”.
With his latest film “Amira”, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, the Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Diab got himself into a lot of trouble. This is not a miracle, because it is about: sperm smuggling – and that is actually a sacred and highly politicized topic in the Palestinian territories.
The plot of this Jordanian-Egyptian-Palestinian co-production is easy to tell: the title hero is the 17-year-old Palestinian Amira, who grows up in the West Bank believing that she is the daughter of a Palestinian prisoner who is revered as a hero. Conceived thanks to artificial insemination from semen smuggled out of an Israeli detention center. When the mother and the father, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment, decide to father a second child in the same way, the man’s sterility becomes apparent. An Israeli prison guard is ultimately identified as Amira’s real father.
In the heated climate of conflict in the Middle East, this is of course anything but a wacky comedy of confusion. It’s a drama, and by no means just for the protagonists of this fictional story.
Doubts about the sperm saga are not allowed in the Palestinian Territories and are officially condemned as “fake news”
In real life, the Palestinian propaganda likes to stage sperm smuggling from prison as a heroic saga. The prisoners are not allowed to have direct contact with visitors; they can only see their wives through panes of glass. If babies are born with finesse anyway, this can already be celebrated as a victory over the occupiers. Such children are called “ambassadors of freedom”.
According to Palestinian sources, more than a hundred babies are said to have been born this way in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past ten years. This is doubted by the Israeli side. After all, such a smuggling would be a failure, which would indicate overly lax controls. But Palestinian doctors swear stone and bone that the sperm will be processed in their clinics after mysterious transport, frozen in the meantime and finally used for in vitro fertilization. For women of prisoners there is even artificial insemination free of charge.
Doubts about the sperm saga are not allowed in the Palestinian Territories and are officially condemned as “fake news”. The film “Amira”, with all its twists and turns, grossly violates the basic social consensus – but it was obviously not intended. Filmmaker Diab feels misunderstood and assured that he only wanted to focus on the difficult situation of the prisoners and their families.
But he can no longer contain the riot. In Jordan, the Royal Film Commission has withdrawn the previously announced submission of “Amira” to the Oscars 2022 in the “Best Foreign Film” category. The Palestinian minister of culture calls for a complete boycott of the film.
Those affected have also spoken out, such as the Palestinian Sana Daka, wife of a prisoner and mother of a child traced back to sperm smuggling. She was bitterly hurt by this film and offered to bring her story to the cinemas instead of “Amira”. “Unfortunately,” she said in a radio interview, “nobody wants to pay for a story that tells the truth alone.”