
“A Spark That Turned into a Wild Creative Ride” | Amber Fares, Coexistence, My Ass!

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why?
I met Noam in a cafe in Brooklyn in the fall of 2019. We knew each other from years prior when I was living in Ramallah, Palestine, and making my first film, Speed Sisters. She was working for the UN at the time. But when we reconnected in the US, she was at Harvard for a year-long fellowship, developing a comedy show called Coexistence, My Ass! The show was generally based on her life, but it was more pointedly a satirical look at what Noam calls “the peace building industry.” I thought the premise was genius, but had no idea if Noam was actually funny enough to pull it off. We decided that it could be fun to make a short film about her experiences developing the show and following her effort to break into the US comedy world.
I hopped on a bus to Boston the next weekend, camera in hand, with no real plan or expectations—just the curiosity to see what Noam was up to. One of the first things we did was walk through Harvard Yard, filming and chatting the entire way. When we got there she walked directly up to the John Harvard statue and made a joke about his shoe. That became the opening shot of the film that’s now premiering at Sundance. This was before the pandemic, before October 7, before Trump 2.0. We had no idea what kind of roller-coaster the next five years held in store for us and for the world.
That moment in the Brooklyn cafe was a spark that turned into a wild creative ride. It was just Noam, my camera, and me—before the layers of production, funding, and applications came into play. I remember it for its simplicity, for creating the foundation of our collaboration and for the promise and power of filmmaking that it held, and it holds a special place in my heart as the seed of this whole journey.