Scandar CoptiAn Interview with Scandar Copti Gary M. Kramer January 2026 Interviews Issue 116 Happy Holidays (2024) is Palestinian Scandar Copti’s first solo feature as writer/director, following his Oscar-nominated Ajami (2009), cowritten and codirected with Yaron Shani. (Between films Copti helmed a series of video shorts). This absorbing drama, which depicts four interlocking episodes in the lives of a dozen characters, won Best Screenplay at the 2024 Venice Film Festival among numerous other prizes. As he did with Ajami, Copti takes a Möbius-strip narrative approach to Happy Holidays. The film drops the audience into a scene where Fifi (Manar Shehab) is being cared for in a hospital after a car accident. The film then cuts to an extended storyline about her brother, Rami (Toufic Danial), who learns his Jewish girlfriend Shirley (Shani Dahari) reversed her decision to keep their baby. As Rami is accused of threatening Shirley, he also grapples with the news that his father, Fouad (Imad Hourani), is facing bankruptcy. When Rami is attacked, he hides the truth of what happened to him from his family. Copti then segues to focus on Rami’s mother, Hanan (Wafaa Aoun), who is planning a wedding for her older daughter, Leila (Sophie Awaad). She is told to be frugal by Fouad for reasons viewers understand. Hanan also hopes that Fifi will fall in love with Walid (Raed Burbara), a kind doctor. However, Hanan and Fouad learn something about Fifi that is concerning. That storyline unfolds in the film’s final section, after an episode featuring Shirley’s sister, Miri (Meirav Memoresky), who is navigating her daughter Ori’s (Neomi Memorsky) depression among other issues. Happy Holidays Copti never makes any of these storylines about Palestinians and Israelis, living side by side in Haifa, melodramatic or soapy. Happy Holidays is a film designed to elicit empathy for the characters, who are faced with difficult situations and moral dilemmas in a precarious, stressful, and yes, political, environment. As he did in Ajami, Copti takes a distinct approach to his filmmaking. He employs non-professional actors whose lives mirror their characters, and he workshops the cast for a year before shooting the film chronologically with two handheld cameras. The result is immersive, and it allows viewers to “be” with the characters just as the actors are. During the weekend of the film’s American theatrical release, Copti spoke with Senses of Cinema about making Happy Holidays. *** It has been 15 years since you codirected Ajami. Why did it take so long for you to make a sophomore feature, and why did you decide to embark on this project solo? There are a lot of reasons. I was a mechanical engineer – a world that was opinionless. When you’re an engineer, there’s the right way to do things, and there’s a wrong way. This is what made me quit engineering and make films. After we finished Ajami, I discovered that [cinema] is also a world that has a lot of opinionless people. And this hit me, personally, very, very hard with Ajami. Nobody believed in the project the way we wanted them to. It was just Yaron and I fighting the whole world. Then it gets into Cannes, and is nominated for an Oscar, and suddenly everybody embraces it. I was like, okay, what am I doing? It was very, very difficult to me emotionally to go through. So, I guess I needed a few more years to understand how I want to make films. This time, I did it on my terms. I worked with my two younger brothers as my main producers, and I picked and chose the people I wanted to work with. I interviewed everyone. I invited the cinematographer to come for a whole week in Haifa and decided that he is the right person for me. Now that I know how to do it without losing my sanity, I am already undertaking the next film. I expect it has not been easy to work as a Palestinian filmmaker. Or has it? You present the world as you understand and experience it. But you take a very unique approach to expressing Palestinian experiences and culture. Can you talk about that a little bit? My films are political, because everything is political, but they are very subtle. I’m not a reporter, and I’m not a politician. I’m not here to prove that you are right, or that you are wrong. I’m here just to highlight issues that I think are important for me and for my society – especially when it comes to Palestinian identity. As a Palestinian living in Israel, my personal Palestinian identity is in danger. We’re not even considered as Palestinians. They call us Arabs and other oxymorons, like Arab-Israelis, to strip us of our identity and of our belonging. In this geography, our existence is being threatened by the genocide, by the expulsions of people, by the ethnic cleansing, by house demolitions, and so on and so on. It becomes a responsibility. I wish I could make a film about my midlife crisis having just turned 50, and how do I deal with my kids, and family, and personal space and love, and all those issues. But I feel that I have a responsibility, almost as an act of resistance, to be critical about issues in my society. Because being critical is what will provoke change eventually and develop a culture of a democracy within the family and society. Happy Holidays The characters’ environment influences the politics, as opposed to the film being about the politics trying to influence the characters. Can you talk about that? Yes, absolutely. You cannot disconnect your life from the politics. You cannot disconnect your life from riding a train and not being stopped, and have your stuff put in an X-ray machine, and being frisked. You cannot go to university like Fifi, and not be hit by the indoctrination of children, because this is what you do. You’re doing your practicum, and they send you to an Israeli school, and it hits you in the face. So, even if you try to escape politics, it will find a way to get to you, because the space that we are living in and everything is politicised, from the media to the education system, to even the food. You know, hummus is political. Sushi is not political. Nobody says sushi is American. Everybody knows sushi comes from Japan. But hummus has this whole idea of colonisation. I cannot just disconnect the reality of the film from the broader reality that I’m living. It’s there. I don’t think, “Let me show this through that,” it’s just there. That is the reality of things. It is there in the way people talk, it is there in the way people behave, it is there everywhere. You take the same rigorous approach to your storytelling here as you did in Ajami, using non-professional actors whose lives closely mirror their characters, workshopping them for months, before shooting chronologically and then editing into a Möbius-strip narrative. Can you explain your process and describe what is so appealing about this way of working? We started filming in 2020, and had to postpone the shooting for 2 years, after only 3 1/2 days of shooting. We tried to restart shooting in 2021, but they didn’t let us – it sounds like a joke, but they closed the sky; we weren’t allowed to fly in the European crew. We resumed shooting in 2022. I do films for a reason. Of course, there’s cinema and the aesthetics and the form, but I want to be able to communicate with the target audience, Palestinians and Israelis. I want to be able to really talk to the audience without creating a resistance. One way I do this is by employing a structure that doesn’t create villains, that doesn’t create antagonists. Everybody is a protagonist, and everybody suffers. Whether you agree with what they do or not, they’re doing it out of a thought process where they convince themselves that they are right. That they’re good human beings. The two mothers in the film do what they do – as funny and weird as it might sound – out of love for their daughters. Because both of them know that their daughters will suffer because society is very strict, and will punish them. So, Miri understands that society will punish her daughter Ori if she chooses not to go into the army, and they will punish her sister Shirley if she goes ahead with this pregnancy. Hanan knows that if society learns Fifi’s secret that her daughter would be punished for life. There is the [social] structure and people that are not perfect. Happy Holidays I do not give a script to the actors. My process is very rigorous. I chose all the actors, and this film based on their real-life professions. Miri is a real nurse who administers allergy tests. And in the film, it’s a real allergy test. Waleed is a real doctor. He is an endocrinologist. The estate agent is a real estate agent. The lawyer, the psychiatrist, the movers, the waiters, every single person comes with the background of their profession. Which brings an attitude, the jargon, and an understanding of reality. I chose them based on how close their personality is to the characters I’ve written. They could be the opposite of the characters they’re portraying, but they have to have certain personal traits. When I was looking for Waleed, I wanted someone who is charismatic, charming, that you easily fall in love with, and then he does something that you don’t like. Same with Hanan. She is a strong woman who tries to control every situation. This is a process that takes time. It could take a whole year of workshops, doing role plays with hundreds of people. And then, you start to spot those people. And once I cast my characters, I start on the location, because we rent locations way before the shooting, to build their past relationships, their past histories together. We start role plays of cooking together, celebrating birthday parties together, then little by little, I start introducing the conflicts that I will be using later on. Once I’m happy and everything is set with all those past experiences and shared histories, I start shooting the film chronologically because there is no blocking. I don’t tell the actors, “You come from here, you hit this mark…” We have to shoot with two cameras with zoom lenses. We don’t have film lights. Everything is lit by practicals and LED bulbs that we put here and there. It doesn’t feel like a set. There is not even a boom operator. It’s verité, fly-on-a-wall. I’m just there with two cameras covering what is happening in real time, so a scene could go on for hours, but we may see only a minute and a half of it in the final film. There are several narrative threads that deal with issues of patriarchy and gender and family as well as ethnicity. I appreciated the subplot about Ori being against doing her mandatory army service. What decisions did you make regarding the storylines, characters, decision points, and moral conflicts you present in Happy Holidays? I start with a general approach to the subject matter. A long time ago, I overheard a female relative of mine telling her son, “Don’t ever let a woman tell you what to do.” So, for me, it was a paradox; how does a woman tell a man not to listen to a woman? That made me start thinking about oppression and how we deal with it, how we internalise it, how we normalise it, but also how values and morality are constructed. We breastfeed our values from the people we love the most – from our mums and dads and teachers – and because we’re social creatures, we start defending those values without questioning them. We never stop and ask: Is it right to go into the army? Everybody does it, and is encouraged to do it, and is rewarded for it, and is punished if they don’t do it. I understand how reality works and how realities are constructed for us. How we work with values, and how we get punished or rewarded. I was super interested in that. Happy Holidays I started looking into stories with those themes. I read a post about a mother asking for help because her daughter had gone crazy. She doesn’t want to go to the army. And this is how she described her. And it hit me – okay, wait a second. What do you mean, “gone crazy”? She wasn’t talking about her daughter trying to evade the army by pretending to be crazy. She actually said, “My daughter lost it.” I realised that it’s so deeply rooted in people, that this is the right thing to do. When from my side, I see what soldiers do at checkpoints, I see what soldiers have done recently in the genocide, you know, all this dehumanisation. I started researching it, and there’s an organisation in Israel called “New Profile,” which helps and supports 18-year-old Israelis that don’t want to go into the army. They actually helped me very much with understanding how those stories go. On the Palestinian side, it was about how we regulate those values of society through shame. The shame in the film could have been any taboo… Absolutely. You could have substituted Fifi’s secret with any secret. I chose something that I think it’s almost ridiculous, but I wanted to take the most ridiculous thing and show how it becomes a huge thing. This is how I construct things. It’s Fifi’s business, so why does the mother need to be so involved? This is our life, this is how we deal with everything, right? We know what we’re supposed to do, and what we’re not supposed to do, we know what we should keep for ourselves. It just takes, you know, a few people to say, “We’re not continuing with this. This is where it stops. Your narrative deliberately shows scenes from different points and forces viewers to make connections. We don’t know how Rami and Shirley met, or how long they were together. Fifi’s hiding something, which prompts a recalibration of her character when it is revealed. Fouad’s financial improprieties are felt, but only briefly explained. I appreciate you don’t spoon-feed viewers information. Can you discuss your strategy of shaping the characters and developing the viewer’s emotional understanding of them? First of all, I trust the audience. A lot of filmmakers think that the audience is not smart enough, and that the audience needs to be spoon-fed. No! I am part of this audience, you are part of this audience, and people are smart enough. In real life, no one will explain to you who attacked Rami. The attackers will not come and tell us. And because my approach to cinema is “fly on the wall,” I’m just there with the camera to capture it. I’ve done a lot of test screenings before the film was out, you know, and 99% of my audiences – and I chose from all ages, the youngest was 13, actually – they understood mostly everything. And if they didn’t, it didn’t bother them. If you ask yourself the question, “Did Fouad really steal the money or not,” the clear answer is there. But it doesn’t really destroy the story if you don’t know. I don’t want to know what happened with Fouad’s money. The fact that it’s there is another pressure for Rami, and I’m feeling that pressure. And then Fouad’s wife Hanan feels that pressure. I don’t need anything more than that, because it doesn’t matter. You are not telling Fouad’s story. When we shift to Shirley’s story, it’s really told through Miri, her sister’s eyes. You recalibrate what you know, think, and feel from seeing how others deal with what they know. It’s brilliant. If you go to the gym, and you’re lifting weights, does it matter if it’s made of metal or stone? It’s still heavy for the person that is lifting. You nailed it. What Fouad has done is heavy for Rami and Hanan. If you don’t get it, it doesn’t matter what he’s done. You still feel the weight of it. Happy Holidays You use handheld cameras and shoot verité style. You do not present the characters from a considered distance. You get us into their emotions. We see their reactions. Why did you shoot so intimately? We’re with the characters, and if you notice it, most of the time that we have a close-up on a character, it’s a single close-up. It’s a person that is locked in the frame. without anyone else. This is what I wanted to convey, that we are left inside our own story. We perceive the world the way we choose to perceive it, without the understanding that others perceive it differently. We are constantly disconnected regardless of what brings us together as a family, a mother and a daughter, siblings, and so on and so on. Because everything is improvised, I had to shoot it with two cameras. I wish I had more, because it becomes easier for me to edit. I always wanted to convey this claustrophobic feeling, and also that something is about to happen. Whenever we open up to a wide shot, it’s very violent. With Rami, when he’s talking to the person that is threatening on the phone, a train comes in, and it’s very, very loud. With Fifi, when she texts Waleed about the problem that needs to be resolved, we only hear the violence of the waves. Let’s talk about the editing. Some scenes linger, and some scenes cut abruptly. Again, it makes me recalibrate what I’m watching as it happens, which keeps me engaged in the film. What prompted the editing style? I edit myself, and I ended up with 180 hours of footage. It took over a year to edit. I ask myself: “Does it make me comfortable now leaving the scene?” If the answer is “Yes,” I cut it a little bit earlier. I try to enter every scene late and leave it a little bit earlier than what it’s supposed to be. I want to stop every scene and ask, “Okay, what’s next? What’s going to happen?” If I stop a scene and you’re satisfied, it’s not good. You talked earlier about working with actors. Do you guide them, or do you just sort of let them be? The process is long. What I actually do is create the intuitions of the character I’ve written. The actors develop the intuition of the character because they come from a totally different world, I mean, Hanan is not the real Hanan. The actress has nothing to do with that. She’s the opposite in her real life. And so is Waleed and everyone else. But through a lot of work, and a lot of role play, I build the intuitions of the characters, and the actors understand it. This becomes a set of rules that they abide by. And then the whole process is based on what is known as the suspension of disbelief – our ability to react with real emotions to fictions. It happens to us when we watch a film. We know, cognitively, that this is an actor, and they are not really a couple, but when she leaves him, or he breaks her heart, we cry. And when someone dies, we’re shocked, although we know, deep in us, that they didn’t die. This requires what people in theatre call “The paradox of fiction.” It requires a lot of concentration, and the ability to stop judging yourself. Yes, as soon as an actor judges their character, they are dead. Yes, exactly. I destroy the traditional, classical relationship that a director has with an actor, in which the actor needs to be comforted and somehow deliver what the director is asking them to deliver. I destroy it to the extent that I never say if it’s good or bad, because it’s meaningless, right? I construct the improvisation in a very realistic way that doesn’t have any shortcuts. I’ll give you an example. In the scene of Ori and the missile drill, she runs out and doesn’t participate. There’s a volunteer soldier that comes and asks her, “What are you doing here?” She says, “I wish a rocket fell on my head.” And then we cut straight to her mum talking to the school counsellor. We shot it in a real school. I did a few run throughs pre-shooting, a few improvisations with a teacher, and I noticed it was a little bit off. But once the scene happened, we shot another scene knowing that it will never be used. The volunteer goes to the teacher and tells her, “This is what happened with Ori…” Then the teacher talks to Ori. And Ori is not talkative at all. And then the teacher talks to the counsellor. And then the counsellor talks to Ori and discovers that she might have depression, and only then the counsellor calls her mum in, and this is the scene that you see in the film. So, there are no shortcuts. They live it. The actors come ready with everything that happened. I am not telling them, “Let’s pretend…” Throughout the whole film, the actors have this feeling that they are driving the story. Happy Holidays I’ll give you another example. In the beginning of the film, when the family goes to Fifi’s hospital, they tell her “You’re coming with us to Haifa.” In reality, the mother said, “You’re coming with us to Haifa, but before that, I’m going to our apartment in Jerusalem to see how you live.” There is a long discussion between them. We filmed in the Jerusalem apartment for three hours, knowing that I would never use it. But in their head, they are driving the story, and I’m there to manipulate stuff, to surprise them with elements that happen. This is how it’s constructed. I’m curious about your ideas of fate, and fear, which the characters discuss. Fear is what drives us. Fear is what motivates us to do anything in life. I’m radical about this approach, because I’m afraid of not having a voice. This is why I make films. My students are afraid of not being educated and not being successful. I think everything in life that motivates us, even brushing our teeth, is based in fear. This is why it’s so easy to sell us things, because we’re afraid of having bad teeth, and we try to make up for it. We try to protect ourselves from all those fears. All the characters in the film are afraid of genuine things that might happen to them. It’s not something that they invent, it’s not a fantasy. It’s true Miri is afraid that her daughter will not have a decent life if people know that she never did the Army service. She tells her sister that she won’t have a decent life if she has a kid from a Palestinian guy. Fifi’s mother is worried about her daughter’s secret. Fear is what motivates everybody, just like in reality and there are two ways to deal with it. There is the courageous way of saying, “Okay, this is my secret and I’m going to face it,” but there’s also fear in that, because you might hurt others. Fifi is very brave as a character, but she won’t come out and say, “This is my secret.” All the characters are based on secrets, which are just a defence mechanism that requires you to keep your mouth shut most of the time. And that’s easy to do. It’s very passive, but secrets have a mental toll on you. You are leading a double life, which can be so exhausting. And then, unintentionally, in your subconscious, you’re looking for a moment to expose your secrets because you just want to get rid of your secret. So, you create a situation that will expose your secret. And I designed Fifi’s subconscious because she knew that if her dad has access to her medical record, he might eventually find out. Ori wants to face her depression, because sometimes it’s more difficult to keep a secret than to face the consequences. What is your biggest fear? My biggest fear is losing people I love. All the rest is meaningless. I’m not afraid of dying. Dying doesn’t hurt you; it hurts the people you love.
