The Beauty of Gaza: an exceptional documentary (review)

This dive into trans women in Tel Aviv allows Yolande Zauberman to once again explore the violence of a country torn from within. Powerful.

Yolande Zauberman's films are never closed in on themselves. They are quite the opposite, assuming their share of uncertainty specific to the documentary form and becoming journeys whose secret issues are discovered along the way. This pact with reality and imagination requires both great human sensitivity and intelligence in approach. The recent release of his first feature film, Classified People (1987) had thus reconstituted all the force of this formidable work of listening.

Classified People showed an old couple in love as on their first day, who alone took charge of the expression of the violence of a South Africa then in full Apartheid. In contrast, their gentleness combined with that of the staging distilled an incredible political and poetic force. This is today The Beauty of Gaza, whose title is also sufficient to immediately define its symbolic significance. “Gaza? I can't talk about it…“, we hear from the mouth of one of the protagonists, a trans woman based in Tel Aviv. By filling the entire space of the frame, this unspoken word ends up imposing itself on us.

It should be noted that the film was shot before the October 7 attacks perpetrated by Hamas on Israeli soil. To say that he was caught up in the news would make no sense, as the awareness of the fractures that haunt the place did not need this bloodbath to be revealed. Yolande Zauberman's cinema is not discursive, it draws its dynamism from its inner music, from a transcendental quest which protects it from a prefabricated truth.

What does it tell The Beauty of Gaza ? Or rather where do we start from here? By the filmmaker's own admission, from her previous film, M (2018), a disturbing dive into the community of Orthodox Jews in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. It was on the set that Yolande Zauberman met trans women whose silhouettes she first filmed fleetingly. One of them later admitted to one of the film's collaborators that she had fled Gaza to go on foot to Tel Aviv. The Beauty of Gaza, it's her. That's what Yolande Zauberman decided to call it, attracted by this route whose almost mythological aspect she senses. We must first find his trail.

A quest begins, the territory of which is concentrated around a small dark street, a shady place where, at night, trans people sell their charms. “If God made us this way, there must be a reason!“, says fatalist one of them expressing the fragility and the threats which weigh on these beings condemned to precariousness. The film is structured in a succession of portraits which reveal a breath of life (and death) outside the common. As for the involuntary instigator of this trip, this Belle of Gaza, she remains untraceable. Her absence ends up becoming the very legitimacy of a story which feeds on the mystery that she arouses. only existed?

This film belongs to a more or less formal trilogy called “ of the night » started in 2011 with Would you have sex with an Arab ? And M. The night is, in fact, the great organizer of this Belle of Gaza. As in American film noir, darkness does not seek so much to hide a shameful truth as to reveal through dissimulation the pain of the beings who inhabit it. Darkness is first of all a refuge for these women left to their own devices in a world that refuses them. Yolande Zauberman with her camera is not an intruder who comes to extract some sensations during an immersion. Everything is part of the image. The exchange materializes through the grace of a staging close to the beings from which a tragic beauty emerges. Powerful.

By Yolande Zauberman. Documentary. Duration 1h16. Released May 29, 2024