Name: Photo Booth
Genre: Musical
Released: 2022-09-23
Duration: 1 h 53 min
Rating: 7.8
Cast: John Gilbert, Sam Al Esai, Alexander Chapman

An interesting collage of resistance to Israeli expansion with queer and nude elements

This film is a collage of many things. There is documentary and re-imagined history, there is Schoenberg opera and pop music videos, there is corporate support of Israeli expansion and the BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement against it, there is the multi-screen approach (often one main creen above a row of four smaller screens), and there is the queer element, including the gay penguin couple (2 guys wearing a penguin head each, and often nothing else).

The title of the film comes from the means of communication between two conspirators. A Palestinian in jail has hacked into the photo booth system, and is talking with a foreign citizen at another booth outside. They are trying to use the gay penguins to disrupt the 2019 Eurovision contest, being held in Israel. (The contest was actually held in Tel Aviv, but repositioned in the film to Jericho in the West Bank for dramatic purposes, and to allow the film to quote Joshua 6:21.)

Since writer-director John Greyson is based in Toronto, elements of Toronto activism are included - York University student protests against pro-Israel speakers on campus, Queers against Israeli Apartheid battling pro-Israeli forces that equated anything against Israel as being anti-Semitic, and the protests at the Toronto International Film Festival's naming Tel Aviv as a Spotlight City in 2009 (2019 in the film).

I saw this film at its world premiere at the Toronto Palestinian Film Festival, with various members of the cast and crew present, and a Zoom Q+A with Greyson. The target audience is some intersection between pro-Palestinian and pro-gay, as some people did leave the screening, maybe due to discomfort at one of these themes. Sitting in front of David Wall, who was responsible for the music, he told me the operatic songs, in German and French, did not have lyrics that mattered - it was the subtitles we should pay attention to. That brings up a viewer conundrum. With multiple screens and subtitles, it was easy to miss something, so it might be best seen in a large-screen TV where the viewer could sometimes rewind to catch everything.

The musical genre features stories that combine music, singing, dancing, acting, and often spoken dialogue to tell a story or convey a narrative. Musicals incorporate various elements of drama, music, and choreography to create a cohesive theatrical experience that engages audiences on multiple levels.

Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965)

A split-screen Opera-Documentary about Penguins, Palestine, and Queer BDS.

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