REVIEW: Oriented (2015, Dir. Jake Witzenfeld)

There are so many identities colliding in Oriented it is sometimes hard to keep up. That holds for both the audience and for the doco's three protagonists, Khader, Fadi and Naim. Living in Tel Aviv, labels tend to overlap. They blur. They liberate and they occupy.

In his film's introductory passages, director Jake Witzenfeld has each of the boys state where they personally draw the lines that surround their identities. Fadi is struggling with the right to call himself Palestinian. Khader is openly Palestinian and in a relationship with David, an Israeli Jew. Naim is gay but not yet out to his parents.

There are battlefronts here, but they're not where most audiences outside the Middle East would expect. The boys' families' acceptance of their gay identities is barely an issue, at least the turmoil they experience is only in line with any young man's fretting over how their loved ones will take the news. It is something that Khader calls out early in the film - a BBC reporter hunting out a story asked for his gay life sob story, to which he replied he was perfectly happy and warmly accepted by his community...

"Can you find me someone who isn't?" was his response.

Oriented is incisive in its ability to slice through the bullshit that surrounds the lives of this community. Going straight to the source and actively stripping back layer after layer of stereotype and ill-informed forced representation, Witzenfeld finds a small community of vibrant, politically charged artists railing against their existence as queer Arabs living amongst those who readily label them the enemy. And he tones the film warmly, tempering the sometimes emotionally oppressive material with the young men's defiant flamboyance.

There's an easiness to Oriented that levels out much of the queerness and foregrounds the personal impact of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Sitting with Khader, Fadi and Naim as they navigate constant worry over left-wing Jewish saviours, cross-cultural relationships and a never-ending barrage of abductions and killings on the news, the all-encompassing cloud that covers Arab life in Tel Aviv is black and impossible to shake. This is thrown into even greater relief once Khader finds himself outside of it all.

Admittedly, the freshness captured by Witzenfeld does raise some question of just how he was able to secure a lot of his footage, which gets quite intimate at times. Scenes with Fadi's family in his home village flow with such embracing realness that it is all too easy that there's a camera in the room somewhere. Other times, there's the niggling feeling that moments have been restaged, or at least postponed for the camera to get set up. Thankfully, none of this breaks the naturalism on display, nor does it hamper film's overflowing personality.

Oriented will dispel a lot of negative imagery cluttered around queer life in the Middle East and raise a whole lot of other questions relating to queer identities and Arab identities in Israel. It doesn’t go hard at them, so there aren’t many solutions put forward, but insofar as it paints a less obscured portrait of those communities, it is well worth the time. At the very least, you’ll make a few new friends.

★★★☆

Trailer:

Oriented screened as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2016 and the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival.