Comment + rating by Nadia Bouchenni:
A Long Hot Summer in Palestine is a beautiful and very interesting documentary released only in 2018. Norma Marcos is once again filming her young niece Yara within the context of the occupation. Through her, she tells how the inhabitants of the West Bank experienced the war in Gaza in 2014.
In the beginning of June 2014, after ten months of waiting, Palestinian-French filmmaker Norma Marcos, who lives in Paris, is finally allowed to travel to the West Bank via Tel Aviv airport to see her sick mother.
Once there, she films her niece Yara, aged 16, as well as Palestinian women in general. The audience saw Yara growing up under the camera of her aunt in two previous films: Waiting for Ben Gurion, and Fragments of a lost Palestine. But the war on Gaza in 2014 disrupted the lives of all Palestinians, and consequently the film project of Norma Marcos.
The kidnapping and killing of three young Israelis that Summer in Hebron, followed by the murder of a young Palestinian man burned alive in Jerusalem, and the arrest of nearly 500 Palestinian youth by the Israeli army, sparked clashes between Hamas and Israel. At the beginning of July 2014, Gaza is again under the bombs. According to a UN report, the number of Palestinian civilians killed during Operation Protective Edge was the highest since the six-day war in 1967. "More than 1,500 civilians were killed, 11,000 injured and 100,000 displaced," the report says.
What is the place of innocent children caught in such a political situation? No Palestinian can remain away from politics. Children sometimes hold adult speeches. How a Palestinian child, even when protected, is affected by politics and occupation is what the movie is partly talking about.
Norma Marcos meets with Vera Baboun the mayor of Bethlehem, who did a study on "the concept of Scheherazade" in The Thousand and One Nights. She questions the status of women via this mythical figure of Arabic literature: "She is the woman who managed to cancel her own decapitation, thanks to her awareness and ability to tell stories to the king".
Yasmine is a young race car driver. She has two jobs and regrets that she cannot go where she wants because of the checkpoints. "This sport gives me the adrenaline rush I need. It adds spice to our lives. We need this to relieve the pressure of the occupation. "
In this film, Norma Marcos meets with artists, creators, and peasants. All these characters constellate the Palestinian resistance in a peaceful way.
She does not anticipate what she is going to film, all the while following her instinct. For example, the scene at the monastery with the cat running to protect her kittens upon hearing the shooting outside, was not prepared.
Neither did she know that a war was unfortunately soon going to break out in Gaza. Her camera broke during the shooting and she finished her movie with her IPad. "
The real trigger for Norma Marcos to change the subject of the film was the tweets of Farah Baker, a young Gazan who was 16 years old at the time of the war. Her tweets were noticed and followed around the world, to the point of making her symbol: "I am sixteen years old and I have already lived through three wars".
Moreover the documentary highlights the economic dependence of Palestine on Israel. Many shop owners and hotel managers wanted to support Gaza, but were unable to do so. For example, a florist regrets that 99% of the flowers he sells come from Israel. "Without the embargo on Gaza, we could reduce this share by at least 40%." He says. A baker regrets that there is only one mill in Ramallah.
There are a lot of films that deal with the subject of Palestinian occupation in an intelligent and very subtle way and Norma Marcos' film is one of these films.