Nazareth-born film director Hany Abu-Assad has become something of a Tinseltown media darling since his 2005 feature film Paradise Now, which centers around two Palestinian suicide bombers, won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and earned him an Academy Awards nomination in the same category.
He later built on that success with another Oscar nod for the 2013 movie Omar, which tells the fictional story of a young man from the West Bank who is forced to work as an informant for the Israeli authorities.
His latest offering Huda’s Salon builds on similar themes: Palestinians who are tricked or coerced into working as spies for Israel. In this case, it is a woman who is drugged while she is having her hair cut at a Bethlehem salon that is run by a woman who is working for the “secret service.” After being rendered unconscious, the victim is stripped naked and compromising photos are taken of her which are then used to force the woman to become an informant.
The Hollywood Reporter (THR) published an interview with Abu-Assad this week in which he discusses why he felt compelled to bring this “real story” to life on the big screen.
The September 12 article titled, Hany Abu-Assad on Palestinian Thriller ‘Huda’s Salon’ and Using Anger to Make “Art With Meaning,” offers a brief introduction to the director’s interview:
Set in Bethlehem in the West Bank, the thriller centers on a young woman who finds her life turned upside down after a simple trip to a salon, where she is blackmailed into working for the occupation…. Speaking to THR, the director describes the real-life scandal at the heart of the story, why he loved going from a crew of 200 to just 20 (and no comfortable chairs) and why it’s important to use anger as fuel for your creative engine.” [Emphasis added]
Abu-Assad offers no further information that would verify his claim that his film is based on true events. When asked about the “backstory” behind his cinematic work, he replies:
I wasn’t actually planning on doing another Palestinian film, but my wife Amira asked me if I knew any stories about women in Palestine [sic] that were worth writing about, and I told her about the salon. It’s a real story about this salon that, let’s say, misused women to get them to collaborate with the occupation.”
He then describes this blackmail method as “a very common trick from the secret service,” before claiming “the whole story came out” after one of the victimized women “committed suicide and wrote a letter.”
While Abu-Assad does not directly reference the Israeli “secret service” in his responses, it is implied with his reference to the “occupation” and the fact the film is set in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Yet, the Hollywood Reporter is nonetheless happy to assert the film depicts a “real-life scandal” in a passage that unequivocally suggests such an incident took place, despite the director offering no evidence to substantiate his claim.
Later in the interview, Abu-Assad is asked whether he believes that “attitudes towards the conflict may be changing in Hollywood with people who haven’t spoken out before now making statements on social media expressing solidarity with Palestine [sic] or calling on Israel to stop its attacks.”
The loaded question, which would lead any reader to believe Israel is currently engaging in unrelenting assaults on Palestinians, earned this reply:
I actually felt that earlier. After I made Paradise Now, I started to feel that the aggressiveness of the, let’s say, Zionist propaganda, how they punish people if you say your opinion, was starting to have a backlash….
In the long term, they are losing. By punishing people unfairly they’re just giving more positive exposure to the Palestinian cause. I know they punished me very hard for many years, but so what, I’m still making movies.”
Again, the Hollywood Reporter does not bother to interrogate these mendacious claims. What aggressive “Zionist propaganda” was Abu-Assad the victim of? Who are these people who have been harmed for voicing support for Palestinians? Who is the “they” who fought one of his earlier films in an “aggressive” manner? And who was it who “punished” him for many years?
For those of us who can identify certain anti-Israel dog-whistles when we hear them, it is pretty obvious what Abu-Assad’s intentions are.
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Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images
