In Happy Holidays, Scandar Copti’s multi-generational patchwork portrait of a family in Haifa, love is complicated by conservative cultural traditions, arcane medical laws, and the irony of being a Christian Arab in a Jewish nationalist land. As in Copti’s previous film Ajami, the Palestinian filmmaker has mostly employed non-professional actors and largely improvised dialogue, giving Happy Holidays a uniquely intimate insight into the heart of a singular existence.

Copti’s subject is how the demands of the modern world often conflict with the simultaneous hope for cultural preservation. Four characters interconnect in a Pulp Fiction-like, chaptered format, each of whom has trouble balancing the myriad demands of family, love and a curious othering inside their own land. Shot by Tim Kuhn, Happy Holidays relies on a persistent hand-held, close-up approach, which allows us to feel beside its characters as they navigate these frequently muddy waters, helped along tremendously from extraordinarily vulnerable performances.

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Happy Holidays Benefits from Beautiful Performances Which (Mostly) Paper Over Its Flaws

The film is emotionally heavy. It is also entirely too reliant on its structure to paper over the severe issues with pacing and repetition. Considering Copti’s approach, the film needed more strict cutting. The shifting POV is never quite justified, if anything hampering our ability to see the overall, domino effect of racial, political, social and religious pressures on an entire group of people.

Rami, an Arab (Toufic Danial) is in love with Shirley (Shani Dahari), a Jew. Their relationship is introduced to us as one in crisis: Shirley is pregnant, and has decided to keep the baby. Rami doesn’t handle this particularly well, and Shirley cuts him off almost immediately. Meanwhile, Rami’s mother, Hanan (a thunderous Wafaa Anoun), struggles to hold down the family’s reputation; her daughter, Fifi (Manar Shehab) is, by the conservative family’s standards, promiscuous and recovering from a car accident, while her husband, Fouad (Imad Hourani) faces bankruptcy from insurance fraud.

Fifi, educated in Jerusalem, is a teaching assistant at a Jewish elementary school. The object of her affection is Dr. Walid (Raed Burbara), Rami’s best friend, but in order to lock him down she has to bury a potentially shameful secret. And, as Shirley navigates the potential for single-mother parenthood, she also faces the implicit racial discrimination of Zionism. Miri (Merav Mamorsky), a nurse, refuses to help her, while privately confronting her daughter, Ori (Neomi Memorsky), who may be faking depression in order to evade state-mandated military service.

There’s a metric ton of juicy sociological themes undergirding these dramatic family dynamics, and not all of them are communicated clearly through the spider-web of Copti’s story structure. Between abortion, Zionism, capitalism, militarization, racism, Palestinian liberation and more, there’s just too much to give full service to. Despite how well-performed it is, Happy Holidays does crumble under its own weight. On a scene-by-scene basis, it is strengthened by its documentary-like verisimilitude, but the whole picture doesn’t coalesce.

There is no corner of these people’s existence that hasn’t been co-opted by trauma and the weaponization of the same to sell nationalistic ideals.

Nonetheless, when the film does work, it really hammers home the haptic feel of existing within a country as militarized as it is. There is no corner of these people’s existence that hasn’t been co-opted by trauma and the weaponization of the same to sell nationalistic ideals. Both the Israeli and Palestinian characters in the film have to battle decades’ worth of political grandstanding, manufactured conflict and the bastardization of ancient holidays.

Though the film’s title ironically points towards the global parlance of looping in fall and winter holidays, it mostly refers to the Jewish holiday of Purim, a costumed holiday which celebrates the triumph of good or evil, equity over discrimination. In modern-day Zionism, which has re-framed so many holidays to suit a patriotic narrative, certain racial and gendered stereotypes get reinforced in bad faith. For the complex characters in Scandar Copti’s wrenching film, progress means unlearning those stories, accepting change, and, based on the film’s startling final shot, bravely barreling past accepted norms towards an unforeseen future.