“Conversation With The Sea”, interview with director Muayad Alayan and writer Rami Alayan

During the Venice International Film Festival 2026 we spoke with director Muayad Alayan and writer Rami Alayan for the film Conversation With The Sea, presented here at the Venice Spotlight section of the Festival. A story inspired by true personal family events set in Jerusalem where the city is a big protagonist as well, and where a mystery lays into the waves of the sea.

The interview

During our interview with FRED Film Radio, the director Muayad Alayan told us that Jerusalem is far more than a setting here in Conversation With The Sea: it is a recurring presence in his cinema, almost a character in itself, shaped by memory, history and the contradictions of everyday Palestinian life. In the film the city becomes indeed a space where personal memories coexist with systematic processes of erasure, displacement and occupation. Alayan describes his relationship with Jerusalem as deeply ambivalent, marked by both love and resentment, and this tension directly informs the emotional landscape of the film. Rather than approaching political realities through abstraction, his cinema focuses on ordinary people and on the intimate consequences of structural violence, and storytelling thus becomes a way of preserving experiences and identities that risk being erased, while cinema itself acts as a means of affirming Palestinian presence and existence.

The writer of the film Rami Alayan reflected on filmmaking as well, as an act that can appear fragile or even futile in times of political turmoil, yet precisely for this reason can become an expression of hope and resistance. Cinema, for him, offers the possibility of projecting Palestinian stories beyond physical and political borders, and creating a dialogue with audiences elsewhere. A central symbol in Conversation With The Sea is indeed water, and particularly the sea: simultaneously a border and an image of freedom, something that separates but also suggests the possibility of escape and liberation. At the same time, the sea carries associations with death, mourning and loss. This duality becomes essential to the Conversation With The Sea film visual and symbolic language, connecting memory, grief and the desire for freedom in a single recurring image.

 

Plot