Mediterranean Fever

Palestinian filmmaker Maha Haj won Best Screenplay in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2022 for her bittersweet and unpredictable comedy-drama about male friendship. Middle-aged, melancholic, and married with two kids, Waleed has abandoned a steady job in banking to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. But his novel and his life in the seaside city of Haifa seem to be going nowhere. That is until he meets Jalal, a fellow Palestinian and the laid-back father of a family that’s just moved in next door. An initially tense meeting develops into a friendship that might just help Waleed get his writing and his life back on track.

I am a filmmaker who has a melancholic state of mind along with a sense of humour. This led me to write a thriller-drama about Waleed, a 40-year-old aspiring writer suffering from chronic depression. Through this fictional male character, I pushed my opinions and daily thoughts to extremes. I know Waleed’s character and I am familiar with it. I developed a mockery of my dark side through a person that is similar yet different from me. While playing with life and death themes, I took Waleed to extremes that I never would have dared to reach… I chose to focus on one personality and express the depression of an individual, in contrast to that of an entire society.

Director Maha Haj