It’s Funny How Complicated Coexistence Can Be » PopMatters

PopMatters initially contacted Fares when she travelled to the 43^rd Torino Film Festival in late November to present the film. She took home two honors, the Jury Prize for Best Documentary and the Gandhi’s Glasses Award. Respectively, her motivations for creating this film were, “how through irony one can discuss the complexity of a tragedy” and “for transforming humor into an act of resistance, able to reveal the contradictions of a conflict and shed a light on war with the simple and universal power of a smile.” 

Since the documentary continued its busy film festival journey, the actual interview took place online at the beginning of January 2026. In that manner, PopMatters met with Fares across time zones shortly after the announcement that Coexistence, My Ass! made the Oscar short list.

‘Coexistence, My Ass!’ Has a Sting in Its Zing

Amber Fares is a cinematographer and director who has worked on numerous documentaries, including her directorial debut, Speed Sisters (2015), about the first all-women race car driving team in the Arab World. That film is set in the West Bank, where she lived for several years. It was during this time that Amber Fares and Noam Shuster-Eliassi met through mutual friends. At that point, Shuster-Eliassi was working for the United Nations as a peace activist.

Her latest documentary is a portrait of Shuster-Eliassi that traces her life including her experience of growing up in Neve Shalom/Wāhat as-Salām (Oasis of Peace) located between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is an intentional community based on a vision of coexistence where Israelis and Palestinians have chosen to live together since the 1970s. Children attend bilingual schools and grow up speaking Arabic and Hebrew.

Noam Shuster-Eliassi jokes that, “What was becoming normal to us was like science fiction in the rest of the world.” Students take classes in peace studies, and the “kids were being groomed to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” Shuster incorporates the impact of growing up in this environment of equality and her parents’ “woke progressive leftist” beliefs into her activism and comedy. 

Fares began filming in 2019, when Shuster-Eliassi was in Cambridge on a Harvard University fellowship to develop a peace-building project. Her proposal was her comedy act. “I basically knew Noam, who she was, what she stood for, and that there would be something interesting there, but did not really know what it was.” The filmmaking was just getting started, along with Shuster-Eliassi’s stand-up career, when COVID-19 hit. She had bookings all over the US, including at the Kennedy Center, when everything started getting cancelled.

As soon as it begins, Coexistence, My Ass! seems to take on a life of its own, slaloming its way through cataclysmic world events, including a global epidemic, charges against Netanyahu, and growing protests in Israel, along with the continued occupation of Palestine, the slaughtering and kidnapping of civilians on October 7th, its aftermath, and the eventual genocide. Taking it all in stride, Fares states, “If you do anything involving Israel and Palestine, you always know there are political elements that are going to come into the film. You may not know what they are, but you always know that they’re going to be there. You just have to roll with it.” 

Roll with it, she did, as she was separated from her subject after less than six months of filming when Shuster-Eliassi returned to Israel in March 2020 and contracted the virus. In this case, Fares was resourceful and resilient and did not lose her vision. She asked Shuster-Eliassi to film herself when possible. Furthermore, Amber Fares contacted Rachel Leah Jones, “who is a really amazing filmmaker/director/producer, and her partner, cinematographer Philippe Ballaïche… They really picked up the mantle while I wasn’t there and were able to react to things quickly because they were living there.” 

Fares seized the opportunity of working with people who all spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and English, including Rabab Haj Yahya, who came on as editor and co-writer. “Rabab is also a long-time partner for me as she edited my first film, Speed Sisters, and she’s a Palestinian citizen of Israel. They all have such an intimate knowledge of what is happening there. It really was a collaboration. I followed Noam as much as possible, but I would not have been able to make this kind of film with this sort of nuance if it had just been me on my own.”

The result is a multi-layered portrait of a smart, intuitive, funny, and deeply committed individual. Fares and her team avoid sit-down interviews, instead allowing Shuster-Eliassi to reveal herself through her honesty, comedy, disappointments, determination, and her own incredible journey. 

Interestingly, Coexistence, My Ass! uses the stand-up show as its framework while weaving in details of Shuster-Eliassi’s life, her evolution, along with major world developments from 2019 through 2024. Fares explains, “It was an idea that I had early on, and that’s without really knowing where Shuster-Eliassi’s comedy show was going to go. From the jokes that I knew of hers, they were all very self-reflective of both herself and her family, her community.”

She continues, “We always knew that we were going to do it [use that stand-up comedy structure], we just didn’t know how we were going to pull it off. When we started to get into the edit, more into the rough cut, what we did was we took a lot of Noam’s jokes from other comedy shows, sometimes in English, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Arabic, and we sort of cobbled them together. In that way, we edited it using the material that she had mostly written already, and then we figured out areas where we needed her to say things or to create a joke or a story.” 

The Sundance application had already been submitted before the team edited the final Montreal comedy show from the fall of 2024. “When we were actually accepted to Sundance, we hadn’t locked the film yet. It was a pretty harrowing time after that. However, I feel like it was something I really wanted to try creatively because it just felt so interesting. We had this comedian, and it just seemed like a great opportunity to push the craft a little bit. I think it paid off.”

Getting Funny Gets to Getting Real

Noam Shuster-Eliassi recounts her shift from working for the UN to comedy during her stand-up. She had heard that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been a TV comedian and had eventually entered politics. “If I want to start taking my political career seriously, I have to start writing jokes,” she quips. Shuster-Eliassi’s ability to fuse her personal world with the political one, and to do so in three languages, depending on her audience, makes for a highly original show. In addition, she has gained a following over the years with satirical bits on Israeli TV and online. 

Fares admits to not knowing Shuster-Eliassi “to be a comedian really,” and she was not “quite sure that Noam was that funny since I hadn’t actually seen her perform” before getting started on Coexistence, My Ass! However, Fares explains that “for my films, I try to find interesting ways to get into stories or issues that are familiar.”

Furthermore, she believes “that the comedy part disarms people, right? When you’re laughing, your heart opens. I think for the film, that by the time it starts to get serious, people are already disarmed. They’re already so with Noam that when things start to get really hard and when she’s saying those difficult truths, people are more receptive to it.”

Coexistence, My Ass! moves seamlessly from satire to seriousness as it follows activist Shuster-Eliassi in action. At one point, we see her wade through a pro-democracy protest where she discovers that most of the participants do not connect Israel’s occupation of Palestine to democracy. She talks to various people she encounters and is insulted by one man who calls her “an enemy of the state”. Shuster-Eliassi corrects him, “I’m an enemy of the fascist state.” 

While stand-up work can be difficult and a comedian may fear bombing on stage, one of Shuster-Eliassi’s biggest concerns is about her Israeli audiences. On screen, she admits that in the US, she feels comfortable telling her jokes and explains how the Palestinians come from a place of awareness, “the oppressed don’t come from an ignorant perspective. The Jewish audience is where we have to work.” 

She is also aware that, as an Israeli, she can get away with saying certain things. While she never makes gratuitous jokes or insults about violence or occupation, she does reassure her Palestinian audience at the outset of an early show, “Don’t worry, I’m only here for seven minutes, not 70 years.”

Some of the film’s mastery lies in its ability to sustain its sensitive brushstrokes in the extreme darkness of October 7th and in what has taken place since in real time. Shuster-Eliassi “sort of stopped doing shows around October 7th because it just wasn’t funny. I think for her it was really traumatic, that’s kind of a big word. It was disheartening to see a lot of Israeli comedians that she had shared stages with in Israel who were now using comedy to entertain troops before they were going into Gaza to commit war crimes. Her comedy kind of shifted.”

In the third act of the documentary, we learn even more about Shuster-Eliassi’s frustrations with Israelis, and we see her having difficult conversations with friends as they stumble through loss. Shuster-Eliassi cries out, “Give us a moment to process. We didn’t have a moment to process or grieve, and then Israel started bombing.” 

During some downtime from performing, Shuster-Eliassi discusses how she gets a lot of support from Palestinians. She understands she can use her platform to get her message out, but there is growing concern about what she can say openly. Stating through tears, “But you know at the end of the day, Noam Shuster is going to be fine.”

It is not something stated with any sense of pride. On the contrary, the comedian-activist despises this reality she must navigate. Fares expands how heavily this weighs on the comedian, “she would be the first one to say that it’s nothing compared to what Palestinians are going through. She has a full understanding of the weight of her privilege and the need to do stand-up comedy, but also to be an ally to Palestinians.

“What Noam does in her work and when she speaks is that – and she says this in the film as well – her job is to work with the Jewish community, within her community. She really is a true ally to Palestinians in that respect. I don’t think she would change her experiences for the world. I know that having Palestinians in her life has been one of the most enriching experiences for her.” 

Though they knew each other before working on the documentary and had many friends in common, Fares admits to learning more about her subject over the five years of filming. “I always knew that she had Palestinian friends, but I didn’t realize the depth and the level of not only her, but of her family’s relationship with the cause. This idea of co-resistance for me was really amazing.”

The director was also able to “get to know Noam’s parents and where she comes from, the depth of her commitment, and the depth of her relationships with Palestinians. It gives me a lot of hope.” 

Further hope was found on the road with Coexistence, My Ass!. After its premiere and Sundance prize, the documentary began picking up awards at festivals such as Thessaloniki International, Full Frame Documentary, and Quebec City. Fares describes the reaction to this film as “very overwhelming.”

Some of the highlights have been “beyond the mainstream festivals”, at venues such as “the organization Ana Contemporary Arab Cinema, in which they screen a series of films made by Arab film makers at BAM in Brooklyn. We had a sold-out screening, which was a lot of Arabs and a lot of Jews in the same space. It was powerful to have that group of people watch the film together. It’s not necessarily about a dialogue, but there is power in shared viewing.” 

A theatrical run in the US took place in October 2025, followed by an online release on Kinema at the end of 2025. This year will see “other sorts of theatrical/community screenings starting in February in Canada and the United States. It will be released on Arte in France and Germany, and will have a theatrical release in Germany and Italy.”

Unfortunately, US distribution has not been forthcoming, “like every other film on this topic. That’s really well known, but we’re trying to find different ways to get this film out to communities. The response has been overwhelming; it’s been fantastic.” 

Noam Shuster-Eliassi’s story underlines a conversation that must get underway more seriously. She makes it clear in the film that her goal as a comedian is not to unify. “My goal is to voice resistance to this insane show of force that has swept everyone up so blindly.” She feels a deep loss over the hopeful vision with which she was raised in a coexistent environment. Fortunately, Shuster-Eliassi has found a way to express co-resistance in an original, sensitive, and satirical way. Coexistence, My Ass! is a courageous testimony to an activist’s vision and commitment, as well as her ability to bring some laughter to this painful conversation.