Why a « beauty salon » in Gaza?
This beauty salon, with the setting we have created, its colors and mirrors, represents our vision of Gaza: a little paradise in the middle of the terrible mayhem.
A « little paradise » displayed in a women’s indoor movie?
Women from the Gaza Strip are like any other women around the world, even though their sufferings are very specific ones. We need women in order to make changes in Gaza. They are our heroes because, despite the ongoing war, they stand for life. In the film, war rages outside the salon, but inside, they continue their conversations, their go on with their love stories. They want to stay beautiful in the hope of a date, of a marriage perspective… While gunshots go off in the street, putting lipstick on is a form of resistance: holding on to “one’s humanity” no matter the circumstances, keeping hope alive.
What was the background of the shooting?
At the beginning of our shooting, in 2014, a new war struck Gaza. The Israeli army killed thousands of civilians in three weeks’ time. At that point, we questioned our film topic which was conflicts among Palestinians, and that while our fellow citizens were being massacred. We eventually decided to stick to it, because talking about life itself was of utmost importance for us. Death being already covered by the medias, little do they care about people’s everyday life. We focused on internal conflicts between Palestinians, liberating ourselves from whatever was expected of us, Palestinian filmmakers. But our emancipation touches its limits, which are those of reality…
