For Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan, that bureaucratic absurdity is painfully personal. The film’s inciting incident grew out of an experience within his wife’s own family, who were forced to prove the death of a loved one more than two decades after he had passed away. Alayan transforms that ordeal into something more intimate: an outward search for answers that slowly becomes an emotional reckoning with memory, guilt, and the pain we leave with those we love. Jerusalem, too, becomes deeply personal. Alayan came to see his native city as a second sea, a place of “vast spiritual depth,” beauty and magic, but also profound melancholy.
Yet Conversation With The Sea is not ultimately a film about despair. At its heart is what Alayan considers one of the most enduring qualities of Palestinian life: hope “against all impossible odds.” For him, Palestinian cinema has a role in capturing and safeguarding that quiet resilience, even amid grief and injustice. Speaking with Arabian Moda, Alayan reflects on the family experience that gave birth to the film, his relationship with Jerusalem, the sea as a metaphor for memory, and why hope remains essential to the stories he chooses to tell.
AM: You’ve said the inciting incident in the film was inspired by true events in your own family. How did you decide what to preserve from reality and where to allow fiction to take over?
Muayad Alayan: The inciting incident stems directly from an event involving my wife’s family. A few years ago, she and my father-in-law received a notice from the Israeli social security authority demanding the payment of a massive debt attributed to my late brother-in-law, who had passed away over twenty years earlier, because, according to their system, he was still listed as alive. It was a deeply traumatizing ordeal for the family, forcing them to repeatedly prove the death of a cherished loved one to an unfeeling bureaucracy.
Beyond that initial trigger, the narrative is fictionalized to serve the protagonist’s emotional arc and the momentum of the story. Yet every fictional layer remains rooted in the lived realities of Palestinians in Jerusalem.
AM: Kamal’s search for an official record of his son’s death becomes much more than an administrative problem. For you, is the film ultimately about finding the truth, or about confronting grief that has never fully disappeared?
Muayad Alayan: It begins as an outward quest for answers, a desperate attempt by Kamal to piece together the years he missed and uncover what truly happened to his son. As the story unfolds, however, this external investigation turns inward. It transforms into an emotional reckoning, forcing Kamal to confront his past choices, his lingering guilt, and the collateral pain he has inflicted on those he loves.
AM: There is something particularly cruel about Kamal having to prove the death of his own son to an official system. What does that bureaucracy reveal about the wider experience of Palestinians living in Jerusalem?
Muayad Alayan: Every mechanism of the administrative apparatus imposed on Palestinians in Jerusalem is engineered to induce despair, wear people down, and ultimately pressure them to abandon their homes and native city. Whether through endless bureaucracy, oppressive taxation, physical segregation, or institutional discrimination, it operates as an interconnected, unjust system, a pervasive tool of displacement.
AM: The title, Conversation With The Sea, carries a very poetic quality. What does the sea represent in the film for you personally?
Muayad Alayan: In the early stages of development, the title spoke directly to the tragedy of the son’s drowning and the poetic idea that the sea holds the hidden truths Kamal is desperately searching for.
Over time, through the final drafts and into the shoot, Jerusalem itself became a second “sea” to me. It mirrors the ocean in its vast spiritual depth, its undeniable beauty, its magic, and its profound, underlying melancholy.
AM: At a moment when Palestinian stories are often viewed internationally primarily through the lens of conflict, what do you hope audiences in Venice will understand about Palestinian life through Kamal’s very personal story?
Muayad Alayan: Hope, against all impossible odds, and despite overwhelming injustice and grief, is the single most vital element Palestine offers to humanity.
More than almost any other regional cinema, Palestinian film exists to capture and safeguard this quiet resilience. At its core, Conversation With The Sea is a testament to that enduring spirit, wrapped inside a story of familial love.