The Roller, the Life, the Fight

Hazem arrives in Belgium after a painful journey from Gaza. Elettra arrives in Brussels to study documentary film. Their first moments together trigger the desire to know each other and the camera becomes the tool they share for understanding. Exiles and inner migrations find a way to just and softened gazes.

Like any closely observed individual, Hazem does not fit the stereotype to which one may want to confine him—well-intentioned souls sometimes reduce the exiled to the sole dimension of victim. When Elettra begins to film him, he is mistrustful, and in the end, The Roller, the Life, the Fight comes to exist as a journey during which they both move towards one another. By becoming co-director, Hazem escapes being an object of study, hate or compassion, to remind us that he too is watching us. Never be satisfied with simply surviving: this is what he seems to advocate when he dreams of being an ice-skater or points up the violence of European administrations. The film embraces the gap between two incomparable life courses—Hazem grew up in Gaza and crossed the Mediterranean illegally, Elettra went to Israel on a university exchange, without immediately realising the violence inherent in her freedom to travel. On both sides, love blossoms on condition of permanent displacement and reassessment. Set at the heart of the relationship and the story, difference becomes a resource. Nothing here can stay in place: goodbye perfection, cloudless love and rosy images! Each shot is presented as a fragment, the partial and situated trace of a moving reality that welcomes absence and abstraction. The film is part of the movement of life, reflects its dead-ends and upturns. On the Greek island where he was so rudely welcomed, when violence occurs again, Hazem makes a fishing rod and imagines himself on another island.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian