Following an ageing fisherman courting a stoic seamstress, the film is a tender depiction of everyday Gazans – with plenty of phallic humour
Issa (The Crown’s Salim Daw) is a 60-year-old bachelor. Every night, he takes his fishing boat out to sea and brings his paltry catch to the market the next day. At the same market, his heart is captured by Siham (Succession’s Hiam Abbass), a middle-aged widow who works alongside her divorced daughter Leila (Maisa Abd Elhadi) as seamstresses for a struggling clothing store. As Issa tries to muster up the courage to propose to Siham, he finds in his fishing net a nearly lifesize antique statue of Apollo, the Greek god of light – equipped with a fully erect penis.
Its title echoes Alain Resnais’s 1959 classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which follows a pair of lovers across a bomb-devastated city. But Gaza Mon Amour does not indulge itself in melancholic discussions about the traumas of war. Instead, the film is a gentle reminder that love is a flower that can bloom for anyone, at any age and in any place.
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