‘I truly believe humor is a tool. It’s a tool that helps people release emotional tension, a tool that helps people feel safe. Very often, when someone tells me a joke or makes me laugh, even about something very small, it feels like a gesture – like they’ve seen me and said, ‘I want to make you feel a little better,’” said Zohar Shahar, one of the co-directors of Bella, a very funny and audacious new Israeli comedy, with a touch of drama, that dares to find laughs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It opened in theaters around the country on Thursday.
That Bella makes fun of a subject so serious that it’s virtually taboo to laugh about is not the only unusual aspect of the film. There is also the fact that Shahar is Jewish, her co-director, Jamal Khalaile, is Palestinian, and that the production features a mixed Jewish-Arab cast and crew.
So by its very nature, the film challenges those who believe that the two groups can never live together.
Bella, which premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival last summer, tells an intricate story that works on two levels. On the surface, it follows two couples, one Arab and one Jewish, and a dove. Yaki (Elisha Banai) and his adopted Arab brother, Bilal (Hanna Birakh), meet again for the first time in years after the death of their father, Yitzhak.
Yaki and his father had long shared a contentious relationship. Yitzhak never supported Yaki’s ambition to be a musician, and Yaki did not share his father’s passion for animals, particularly the doves he raised. After Yaki moved to Belgium, the two barely kept in touch.
When Yaki returns to Israel for the funeral with his girlfriend, Limor (Jade Daiches Weeks), he reluctantly reconnects with Bilal, a Palestinian orphan whom Yitzhak had taken in.
Bilal had been far closer to their father and shared his love of animals, working alongside him for years. Now living in the West Bank, Bilal works in a pet shop but dreams of opening his own store. He is married, and his wife, Narjis (Asheel Farhat), is desperate for him to find a stable livelihood.
Both couples urgently need money, but all Yitzhak leaves behind is a dove named Bella.
Yaki initially tells Bilal he can keep her until he learns that the bird is worth $30,000 and that a wealthy buyer, a sheikh from the United Arab Emirates, is traveling to Jerusalem to purchase her at a fair.
Narjis does not believe Yaki is entitled to the dove, and she brings Bella with her to a family wedding in Area A of the West Bank, the one under both Palestinian administrative and police control. Yaki and Limor follow in an attempt to reclaim the bird, finding themselves in a series of increasingly tense situations.
Beneath the surface, the story functions as a biblical allegory about the eternal rivalry between two brothers, with the white dove symbolizing an elusive peace.
Yet the film is so consistently funny that the symbolism rarely feels heavy-handed, emerging only occasionally to underline moments of drama.
World's most acclaimed filmmakers among the producers
Another unusual fact about the film is that among its producers are Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian directing duo who are among the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers. This is the first time they have chosen to support an Israeli movie. Given recent calls worldwide to boycott Israeli filmmaking, it can hardly be a coincidence that they have made this choice right now.
The film is so much fun and so original that it would have been playing at international film festivals at any other time, but in the current political climate, it has been shown abroad only at a handful of Jewish film festivals, among them the Other Israel.
For Shahar and Khalaile, the choice to explore the conflict through comedy was deliberate and carefully considered.
“We were always aiming for comedy,” Shahar said. “But in the writing, it was more important to first bring in the dramatic complexity, and only then allow the comedy to emerge. It was a process of building the characters, really feeling them, and only afterward shaping it in a more comic direction.”
Shahar, who lives in Wadi Ara, is keenly aware that not everyone feels comfortable laughing at a reality shaped by conflict. That discomfort, she said, became part of the directing duo’s challenge.
“Our deep intention was to create a space where viewers from both of our peoples could sit together in front of the same film and, just for a moment, laugh together.”
Khalaile, who is based in Acre, has witnessed that effect firsthand at mixed screenings where Jewish and Palestinian audiences watched the film together. “Suddenly this side is laughing, then suddenly that side is laughing,” he recalled. “Different moments, different people laughing. It was really beautiful.”
Instead of creating a typical political narrative about victims and persecutors, the filmmakers deliberately grounded Bella in the characters’ lives. “We focused on the personal stories,” Khalaile said. “Everything happens at eye level. The big politics aren’t really there. It’s about family relationships, couplehood, [and] what happens between parents and children.”
That choice, he explained, was born partly out of discomfort with films that offer black-and-white moral narratives.
“From my experience watching films like that in the past, you come out feeling blocked emotionally,” he said. “It becomes: am I the victim or am I guilty? And there’s nowhere to go from there. We wanted to offer a new space – one where people could pause and think.”
The biblical undertones were intentional, though neither director wanted them to overwhelm the narrative. Khalaile acknowledged that the film draws on mythological structures shared by Jewish and Arab cultures alike.
“We chose a father named Yitzhak, with two sons,” he said. “We didn’t overthink it, but there were signposts from the beginning. Both societies are traditional, Semitic societies that sit on the same myths.”
Shahar said the biblical echoes allowed the filmmakers to speak indirectly about the present.
“We wanted these themes to resonate within our narrative space,” she said. “The two brothers – Yaki and Bilal – are fighting over a dove, but really, each of them is trying to create a better family, a better future, a better existence.
They can’t move forward because they can’t make peace with their past… In order to build a good home, a person first needs to make peace within their soul with their parents.”
The two have worked on the film for over a decade, which helped them develop perspective on the material. The movie was filmed not long before October 7, 2023, and a few lines of dialogue were added to refer to the war in post-production. It was important for the directors to dedicate the film to the memory of Yaniv Sarudi, a young producer who was killed at the Nova Festival as he helped many to escape.
When asked whether releasing Bella now was an act of courage, Khalaile agreed, but added that timing was almost beside the point. “We’ve been working on this since 2015,” he said. “And Zohar first wrote it in 2008 or 2009 as a student project.”
“The violent reality around us will always give us a reason not to speak,” Shahar said. “It will always give us a reason not to say how we think life here should look. This film is a kind of proposal for a humane, shared existence. There is probably never a ‘right’ time to release something so openly comic and human.”
The origins of Bella are deeply personal for Shahar. She began writing the script while her children were attending a bilingual Jewish-Arab school run by the Hand in Hand association.
“Questions of Jewish-Arab encounter, Israeli and Palestinian identity, and what you’re allowed to talk about – and what you’re not –these were the questions I was living with,” she said.
Early versions of the script, written while she studied at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem, attracted attention and even won awards, but something felt wrong. “It took me time to understand that I was writing about two Jewish couples, even though one had Arab names,” she said. “Having Arab friends didn’t mean I could write about an Arab Palestinian family on my own. Their identity is too complex.”
That realization led her to stop working on the project until she received an unexpected phone call.
“A man said, ‘Hello, my name is Jamal. I’m a filmmaker looking for a Jewish partner to work with. I got your number from a friend.’ It felt like the film itself was calling me and saying, ‘Don’t give up.’”
From that point, collaboration became the foundation of the film.
“We rebuilt the script from scratch together,” Shahar said. “The process was first and foremost about getting to know each other deeply, talking about things we couldn’t talk about with anyone else. From that, all the layers of the film grew: the family dynamics, the sensitivities, the unresolved pain.”
Both directors stress that Bella is not meant to offer solutions. But they hope it can change how people feel – if only briefly.
“We want people to leave with a sense of hope,” Khalaile said. “That’s how we experienced the film working.”
Shahar said, “If the film can be one more tool people hold onto to start talking again, then it’s done what it was meant to do.”
Khalaile agreed, saying, “Maybe it can be a small point of light in this tunnel.”