Amira: Palestinian Detainees 'Sperm Smuggling' Film Gets Social Media Flak

ALBAWABA- The controversial film Amira continues to make headway on the social media with people expressing their distaste at the Jordanian/Palestinian/Egyptian movie.

People are angry by the fact that the film trivialises a forced Palestinian issue into an artistic form for world audiences as its talks about the sperm of Palestinian prisoners smuggled out of Israeli jails to father siblings outside prisons.

This practice has been going on since at least 2012 when about 100 Palestinian children have been conceived this way. It’s a practice that is carefully monitored in its different stages and sanctioned by the Palestinian legal and religious authorities to make sure that no wrongdoing takes place.

For the Palestinian prisoners that number over 4500 and locked up in Israeli jails for many years and some decades - and around 450 of them on administrative detention - the film belittles them, mocks their situation and makes light of their existence.

The film turns a crude and cruel reality into what amounts to a fictional fantasy. How can an Arab film crew, a film director and a band of actors from this part of the world do this is beyond anyone's comprehension. What’s worse is the film’s artistic touches are highly appreciated by the praise-worthy events such as the Venice Film Festival and the Carthage venue in Tunisia.

The nitty-gritty, and here it’s gets interesting, is the central theme but it makes your blood boil. The central character of the movie is the young woman who at a certain stage in her life finds she is the product of semen smuggled of prison.

She is a ‘jail baby’ conceived through her father who has languished in jail and has no prospect of being let out.  The second, more like shock than a fact, is the way she finds out her real father is not a Palestinian but an Israeli prison guard who had somehow switched the sperm sample to that of his own. 

For the Palestinian cause this is a clear catastrophe away from the fiction, science fiction and the acting. The consequences and the implication of the dialogue and the scenes in the film is for all to see.

Palestinians, and this is real-time life, are angry and frustrated at a fictional set of events that seek to question the parentage of their children with the director, unknowingly and/or insidiously, placing the element of doubt in every Palestinian prisoner about so many things. This is including his kids, the family he is raising while he is locked up behind closed doors and how his immediate sorroundings, kinship, community and society comes to view him.
—
Those on the social media platforms have not abated in their contempt. For many, Amira simply whitewashes Israeli crimes, saying the film must be boycotted as it insults Palestinian prisoners for it defames and disrespects them and its a “poisonous use of art to help and bring benefits to Israeli occupation.”

That's one. For another, the film is seen as "outrageous", distorting the image of Palestinian prisoners and their families. In that respect, its downright shameful in its depiction to honorable and heroic men and women who are fighting for freedom from occupation and subjugation. 

And as a result one posted Amira is a "'clumsy" shallow, tasteless Jordan film" that is "garnering a lot of rejection, anger and scorn from the Jordanian public because its perceived motive is to denigrate the struggles of Palestinian prisoners' in Israeli jails.

One tweeted in Arabic "this is the worst for the Palestinian case for it is presented in a distorted way that is far from reality..."

Leading Jordanian actress Juliette Awad who starred in the Palestinian diaspora series that was made in the late 1990s bashed the film. "...It has been written with a purely Israeli scenario,  the producers and those who worked on marketing it deserve a beating with shoes..."

Because of the mass popular negative reaction the organizers of the film backed down. The Royal Film Commission in Jordan decided not to nominate the film for the 2022 Oscars it was reported. 

The film director Mahamad Diab said the film was being pulled off cinemas in Jordan and will not be shown because of the reactions. However, he did appeal to Palestinians and their families to see for themselves and decide whether the film is worth watching or not, denying the film pandered to the Israeli narrative. 

But in terms of media everyone is taking about the film, including all the international networks from the BBC, CNN, Fox News to Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and even Israeli news networks like the Jerusalem Post.

In a sentence, Amira has galvanized public opinion.