‘Happy Holidays’ Review: Scandar Copti’s Winning Screenplay Offers an Unflinching Look at the Impossibilities of Integration | TIFF

Fresh off a well-deserved Orizzonti Award win for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays lands at TIFF and does not disappoint. Boasting one of the year’s most thoughtful and potent screenplays full of timely themes and rich characterization, the film is certain to find further appreciation as it continues its festival run. 

15 years after his Academy Award nominated film Ajami, Copti finally returns with an intimate yet ambitious social drama that has a lot to say about the world we live in today, without ever feeling didactic. This is an intelligent film that, while leaning mostly on dense dialogue, never fails to keep us engaged, intrigued and thoroughly invested in its characters. Told via four chapters, we see characters’ fates intertwine as the script narrates their stories with key intersection points from which the other chapters emerge – with the final chapter coming full circle. It is a brilliant move that fully encapsulated what the film is truly about: integration, or lack thereof. 

Questions about whether Palestinians and Israelis can ever find peace are not the center of the film – Scopti is far more interested in going one step further. Assuming that peace can ever exist, as unlikely as it is, can both nations ever succeed co-exist on a social, and not a political, level? And how exactly does integration work, if each nation isn’t fully ready to accept and integrate with their own? The complexity of such questions, which are increasingly relevant today, is handled with impeccable narrative deft as Copti selects characters that are in direct and indirect collision with their own social circles as well as with the other side. Rarely have we seen Palestinian films address integration this deeply, posing urgent questions about internal integration as an indispensable prerequisite for external integration. If we aren’t ready to accept ourselves and make peace with our own differences, are we ever going to be ready to co-exist with others? 

It’s a fascinating topic that perhaps hasn’t been explored recently except in Mohammed Diab’s Amira, although Copti’s examination of the topic seems far more in tune with a narrative that doesn’t take sides and is clearly keen on eliciting less emotion in favor of a much more cerebral experience. But if Copti opts for ideas more than emotions, he is keen on authenticity and credibility as well: the film’s entire cast feel like non-actors, delivering their lines without an ounce of pretense. Whether Copti has relied on non-actors or a professional cast expertly guided, the impact is so real and adds much weight to the film. 

In chapter one, we meet Palestinian middle-aged Rami (Toufic Danial) whose Israeli girlfriend Shirley informs that she’s pregnant. For obvious reasons, the pair has not planned this, knowing that such a child can impossibly exist in today’s charged atmosphere. There simply is no place for an Arab-Israeli child, the world can fit in only one identity – a mixed one spells doom for the child even more so than the parents. The next chapter follows Rami’s mother, the family matriarch Hanan (wonderfully and effectively played by Wafaa Aoun) who is quite the domineering character. The family is on the verge of bankruptcy but Hanan refuses to acknowledge it. To admit the family is losing its long-held social status means they would have to integrate with a lower social class, something that Hanan will never be able to fathom nor accept. 

The film jumps to Israeli society with chapter two, as we follow the aftermath and impact of Shirley’s pregnancy on her own family. She informs her sister who immediately advises her to abort the baby but Shirley is determined to keep it. Coming full circle, the fourth and final chapter shifts back the focus to Rami’s household as we follow his sister Fifi (Manar Shehab) who is shamed by the family due to her sexual freedom. It becomes clearer as each chapter goes by that just as both nations do not foresee a plausible scenario where they could integrate and co-exist, each side is unable, and more importantly unwilling, to accommodate differences within its own people. When everyone is forced to conform, those who refuse stand out and risk humiliating ostracism.  

To integrate is to accept and understand – let alone forgive. But the characters of Happy Holidays are incapable of offering or being granted such understanding. The result is two mutually exclusive societies that remain internally and externally divided; at odds with their own selves as well as with the other side. Perhaps there will never be ‘happy holidays’, perhaps none of these characters will ever find peace. It’s why happy endings are increasingly being limited to fairytales, in a world that refuses to forgive and is adamant on not moving on.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.