Life is Beautiful

Production year: 2023
Country: Palestine/Norway
Director:Mohamed Jabaly
Producer: Kritine Ann Skaret, Sarah Winge-Sørensen & Mohanad Yaqubi

In 2014, the young Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly was on an exchange in Norway when the borders of his home Gaza were closed for an unspecified period. This posed several problems, one being that the Norwegian government would not accept his Palestinian passport, meaning that Jabaly was now stateless. Then his application for a work permit was rejected, because being a self-taught filmmaker meant he didn’t have the necessary qualifications. It meant he was trapped with his host family in the arctic city of Tromsø, and couldn’t travel. One of the upshots of this situation was that he was unable to attend the screening of his 2016 debut film Ambulance at IDFA.