May­or

At the start of David Osit’s May­or, Ramal­lah is described as a ​“city in tran­si­tion”. Musa Hadid, who is the city’s may­or and the film’s pri­ma­ry sub­ject, is cer­tain­ly always on the move. Fre­quent­ly filmed from an over-the-shoul­der van­tage, he spends most of the film dash­ing in and out of meet­ings or dart­ing around the city’s streets, per­pet­u­al­ly stretched yet nev­er remote­ly shaken.

Yet, as may­or of the de fac­to cap­i­tal of Pales­tine, he faces a chal­lenge that many oth­er munic­i­pal admin­is­tra­tors do not: he is in charge of a region under occu­pa­tion. ​“Local gov­er­nance,” Hadid says, ​“is the most beau­ti­ful field of work in the coun­try”. But, as Osit’s non-fic­tion por­trait strives to illus­trate, it is far from the eas­i­est. Through­out, the film returns to one over­rid­ing ques­tion: is it pos­si­ble to effec­tive­ly run a city that exists with­in an unrecog­nised state?

One aspect that a less­er direc­tor might have over­looked is the pure logis­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions of man­ag­ing a city under siege. You can’t solve sewage spills if your repair trucks are blocked at check­points, and you can’t build a water treat­ment plant if you don’t have con­trol over con­struc­tion rights. ​“I lit­er­al­ly can’t deal with this shit,” Hadid says while step­ping through pud­dles – a line that is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the wry, irrev­er­ent tone with which the film treats its increas­ing­ly tricky business.

Using a style rem­i­nis­cent of the obser­va­tion­al doc­u­men­taries of Fred­er­ick Wise­man, Osit clev­er­ly struc­tures his film as a series of esca­lat­ing obsta­cles, some of which are com­i­cal, while oth­ers are more seri­ous. They slide from the bureau­crat­ic and banal (as in the open­ing, which sees a bored-look­ing Hadid dis­cussing city brand­ing) to the out­right dan­ger­ous (like the lengthy clos­ing sequence in which the may­or dodges gun­fire and tear gas as the city cen­tre is attacked by Israeli sol­diers). Each scene is beau­ti­ful­ly observed, and they are sequenced smart­ly so as to con­vey a mount­ing sense of the city’s com­plex geopo­lit­i­cal con­flicts and the var­i­ous chal­lenges that the cit­i­zens face.

What is a lit­tle less rev­e­la­to­ry is the depic­tion of the man him­self. Maybe there is no need for a crit­i­cal por­trait of a hum­ble man con­duct­ing dai­ly mir­a­cles under con­sid­er­able duress, but Osit’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Hadid can some­times feel adu­la­to­ry. Made by an Amer­i­can direc­tor, the film also has a slight pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with issues relat­ing to the US, as seen in the large por­tions of the film that are devot­ed towards Don­ald Trump’s deci­sion to relo­cate the Unit­ed States Embassy to Jerusalem.

Most insight­ful are the more inter­na­tion­al­ly-ori­ent­ed moments, such as the scene in which Hadid faces up to a pan­el of diplo­mats propos­ing that both Israel and Pales­tine are equal­ly to blame for dis­agree­ments with­in the region. When asked why he won’t prof­fer plat­i­tudes or pose for pho­to-ops, Hadid remains resilient, stat­ing that it is a mat­ter of ​“dig­ni­ty.” In these scenes, when his smile drops and the jokes sub­side, a more mul­ti­fac­eted sense of the man behind the munic­i­pal­i­ty emerges. Behind the press­ing prac­ti­cal con­cerns resides res­olute­ly polit­i­cal ideals. ​“When it comes to dig­ni­ty, I think that’s some­thing non-negotiable.”

May­or is avail­able to watch now via Dog­woof.