Holy Air’s dark humor may be a beacon for understanding in Middle East

The dark, wry humor Holy Air creates bright moments of understanding set amidst the gloomy conflicts in Israel.

As someone who has spent close to five-and-half years in the Middle East (mainly Jordan, Israel, and Palestine), I can tell you, dear reader, that it can be quite draining. Even if you avoid consuming news about any of the dozens of hot, cold, and in-between conflicts going on in the region at any given moment, your personal interactions will end up absorbing into your soul some of the very personal pain and trauma of its intense denizens, who are almost never shy about opening up about their emotions or views on the conflicts.

Amid the larger conflict fault lines, the struggles of smaller minority groups in the region are often overlooked. This goes for Christians in Israel, though not in the overt, often deadly ways that often characterize the struggles of other minorities in the region, and the film Holy Air subtly yet profoundly illustrates some of the relevant dynamics.

Bottle Dreams

Holy Air, from director, writer, producer, and star Shady Srour and already available on a number of streaming platforms, won the FIPRESCI Prize and has been nominated for three other awards. It focuses on what it’s like be a couple in Nazareth, an Arab city in northern Israel, when that couple is both Christian and liberally modern, facing local pressures that have worn down Middle Eastern Christians in recent years long before the advent of ISIS.

To many Israeli Jews, they are still Arabs. To the Muslim majority of the Arabs, they are Christians. Either way, they are somewhat outsiders in their homeland, even in Jesus’s supposed birthplace.

They are not treated as outcasts in some sort of extreme sense, but what the film shows quite well is the small, tribal ways this can play out: the way a successful Jewish friend of the main Christian Arab character is reluctant to do business in Nazareth with him because of “politics” and “Arabs,” or how the same Arab Christian is expected to bring in “Christian” business for his uncle because his name (Adam) is very Christian, or how Adam gets beat up by a local Nazareth gang.

The film even intelligently and brilliantly manages to poke fun at religion—another elephant in the room—or at least the human practice of it in the region and its undeniable link to the tourism industry, doing so without being disrespectful to anyone’s faith.

But the way the humor does succeed, and succeed terribly well, is in using itself to create empathy and sympathy for the plight of an increasingly challenged and marginalized group that is often overlooked by the large Jewish and Muslim populations that swallow the tiny Israeli-Palestinian Christian minority.

Throughout, the overall conflict rears its ugly head, sometimes in heartbreaking fashion, but, perhaps even more prominently, the divisions within the two major sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are also visible.

This thought-provoking dark comedy juxtaposes humor and absurdity and sadness, which is perhaps the best combination of prisms possible through which to view the Middle East overall but also the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the plight of Christian Arabs living within it.

No matter your background, it is hard not to feel for the anguish of this Arab Christian couple, comprised the two main characters, played by writer-director-producer Shady Srour (Adam) and Laëtitia Eïdo.

He is filled with a dark melancholy throughout, but her anguish erupts several times in the most moving scenes of the film. He more subtly and she more starkly create moments of hope and pain that transcend ethnic and religious dividing lines and can make anyone respect the challenges they and others like them face in such an emotionally draining environment.

At one point, the Adam, his uncle, Adam’s Israeli businessman friend, and a Catholic priest are all doing a publicity event to sell “holy air” (the film namesake air from a nearby holy mountain on which Jesus was supposed to have passed through a hostile crowd, put into a small bottle) in honor of the Pope’s upcoming visit.

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Just as our protagonist is talking peace and brotherhood, Israeli warplanes buzz overhead and a rocket attack siren wails followed by helicopter sounds (parts of Israel sometimes come under rocket fire from one or more hostile militias in the region), shaking the showcased air bottles and sending the crowd gathered and everyone beside Adam fleeing as he just stands there motionless, brooding amid the sounds of conflict.

Here, the sounds of war fill viewers of any stripe with dread, but it is used to create a funny black-humor sense of frustration for the main character, an effect that defines the film throughout.

Amid darkness, understanding

In Holy Air, it is the conflict which darkly and sometimes humorously keeps interjecting itself into the lives of the main characters, but apart from being funny, it helps the audience, Jewish, Arab, or otherwise, to unite in empathy and maybe even sympathy for characters from an oft-forgotten minority worrying about their hopes, dreams, and future and how to preserve them amidst the random and senseless intrusions of various conflicts and fault-lines in the region.

As a tool for producing understanding in unexpected places, the film succeeds with its wry humor in profound ways.

Holy Air is available on Amazon (Prime), Google Play, YouTube, and Apple iTunes.