“It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass!

Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then disillusionment with the impotence of institutions set in as well as her realization that, when you’re a Hebrew-Arabic-English-speaking,Mizrachi-Ashkenazi Jew often mistaken for an Arab — with a Palestinian best friend who could pass for Ashkenazi — you’re sitting on a potential comedic gold mine and perhaps a way to build bridges one punchline at a time. Until, that is, October 7th, 2023 put idealism itself to the test. Just prior to the doc’s January 26th Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with Fares (Speed Sisters) to learn all about the ups and downs of a five-year, multilingual, country-hopping journey with an Israeli wisecracker raised to defend peace at all costs.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.