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    “Coexistence, My Ass!” at IFC Center 10/29 and DOC NYC in November

    DocumentaryMovies
    By Herbert Gambill
    2 min. read

    Noam Shuster Eliassi’s unique career as a pro-peace progressive turned comedian is portrayed in Amber Fares’ eye-opening and funny documentary “Coexistance, My Ass.” The film opens October 29 at Manhattan’s IFC theater and will also screen at next month’s DOC NYC festival.

    Noam’s mother is Iranian-Jewish and her father is Romanian-Jewish. (She calls herself a “brown Jew.”) Her progressive parents moved to the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam (“Oasis of Peace” in Hebrew and Arabic) so their children would be raised in a community that promoted harmonious relations between Jews and Arabs.

    She had already enjoyed a certain amount of fame for her pro-peace activism (including a stint at the UN and meetings with the Dalai Lama and other progressive and spiritual leaders) but her social media videos went viral after she worked on a one-women comedy standup show during a residency at Harvard University.

    A huge advantage for Noam is that she speaks both Hebrew, Arabic and some Farsi. Beginning her comedy monologue in Arabic she tells the audience, “Imagine the white people are now thinking the whole show is in Arabic!” Despite her success, her mother worries about her daughter being in her mid-30s and still single; we see her chats with friends about her online dating experiences alternating with her crying about the genocide in Gaza after October 7. 

    In 2005 Albert Brooks made “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” a controversial movie about a standup comic (played by himself) trying to find out how to make Muslim audiences laugh. He didn’t learn much (and the film was a box office failure). Noam has had much better luck at making a variety of middle-eastern people (Jews, Arabs and Iranians) laugh and think about why coexistence has been so impossible for at least 70 years. I hope she keeps fighting for peace, one joke at a time.

    If, like me, you are very concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, I urge to watch Rashid Khalidi’s five-part People’s Forum short course “A History of Modern Palestine.” It has ended but you can watch all five of the lectures on YouTube here.

    The DOC NYC festival runs from November 13-20 in Manhattan and online from November 13-30. Go here for the full schedule, showtimes and tickets.  I’ll be covering it and here is a list of the 33 films out of over one hundred features plus many shorts I hope to see. (There are a number of others I have already seen.) I’ll be lucky if I can catch half of these but these are the ones whose subjects intrigue me:

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