Fadia, written, directed by, and starring Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker Shady Srour, has earned major recognition at the 2026 Monte-Carlo Television Festival, where it won Best Film, Best Actress for Yara Jarrar, and, in a unanimous decision, the Jury Special Prize.
It was produced both as a four-part television series for Makan, Israel’s Arabic-language public television channel, and as a feature-length work for theatrical and festival release.
A tragedy about violence against women, Fadia entered a polarized cultural moment. It is dark, intimate, and emotionally taxing, taking on honor killing not as an isolated crime story but as a broader tragedy shaped by rumor, social pressure, and silence.
Srour said he made the film to confront a subject many communities still avoid facing directly.
“I wanted to make something about honor killing,” he said. “My big question was, how can a father, or a brother, or a mother kill their own daughter for something like this?”
Gossip, not reality often source of honor killings
Drawing on years of reflection and research, Srour said the violence in such cases is often sustained less by facts than by fear, shame, and reputational pressure.
“In more than 90% of the cases, there are no actual behaviors,” he said, suggesting that rumors, not proven actions, can lead to these so-called honor killings.
“It’s not real. It’s gossip,” he added.
For him, the problem is not narrowly religious but rooted in a wider chauvinist and paternalistic social order.
“The most important thing here is the message about the violence against women,” Srour said, adding, “Society’s silence is part of the violence.”
Fadia’s early reception suggests that message is landing. Notably, Srour’s picture won Best Screenplay and Best Debut Film at the recent Haifa Film Festival, along with the Shulamit Aloni Award for human rights, while audiences responded with unusual intensity.
“Everybody came afterward to speak to me – some people cried,” he said.
Srour had expected more resistance. Instead, he said, “so far people really loved it.” In some cases, viewers even approached him with stories of relatives killed years earlier, crimes that families had never fully spoken about in public.
“My films stay with them,” Srour said.
Srour, whose background is in theater, described the film’s structure as “very Shakespearean,” not because of the language itself, but because of the way the story is shaped as a tragedy.
It has long monologues, morally loaded confrontations, and a family drama moving toward catastrophe.
“Macbeth was my inspiration,” he said, especially in shaping the mother. “I wanted to bring classical tragedy, in a realistic thriller approach, to modern times.”
According to Srour, even the title carries symbolic weight. Fadia, he said, is the feminine form of the Arabic name Fadi, meaning “the redeemer,” “the savior,” or “the one who sacrifices himself for others.”
It is a word with particular resonance in Christian tradition.
For him, the name points to more than the fate of a single character. Fadia is “not only a woman struggling to survive violence and silence,” he said, “but also someone who, through her suffering and confrontation, exposes the deeper wounds within society itself.”
Her journey, he added, becomes “an act of sacrifice, resistance, and rebirth.”
Helping translate that symbolic and emotional weight to the screen was veteran cinematographer Barry Markowitz, who said he was stunned by Srour’s screenplay from the start.
“I read the script he wrote… I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was as good as Sling Blade.”
For Markowitz, a cinematographer with a long Hollywood résumé, that was the highest form of praise.
“A script on family honor killings – it was incredible,” he said. “I read it in a half hour. I couldn’t wait to turn the page.”
By the time Fadia was in production, Markowitz was already known in sections of the Israeli film world through repeated collaborations with Israeli-American director Danny Abeckaser.
A producer familiar with that work urged Srour to consider him, and Srour had also seen Markowitz on set, saying he knew the creative force he could bring to a production.
Even so, the partnership was not immediate. Srour recalled how Markowitz initially worried about the script’s heavy dialogue, then called back with growing conviction.
“He told me, ‘Shadi, I want to make this film with you,’” Srour said. What finally persuaded him was not only Markowitz’s credentials, but the intensity with which he spoke about Srour’s previous films and the emotional logic of his shots.
When passion meets art
Srour said Markowitz’s passion for the project helped determine the shape of the production itself.
At one point, he said, an opportunity arose for a larger overseas production package that would have brought more time, money, and logistical support.
Instead, after weeks of hesitation, he chose to proceed with Markowitz. “I love to work with people who have passion,” Srour said. “He has so much passion.”
In the end, he said, “I went with Barry, and I’m happy.”
That decision appears to have changed the film’s visual language. Srour described Markowitz as both a disrupting and energizing presence on set.
“I love working with him,” he said. “He came with huge energy and a huge voice.” Once he engaged on set, Srour said, “Markowitz moved everything.”
He credited Markowitz for pushing him beyond his usual style. “His cinematic language also took me out of my safe zone,” he said. “The lenses that he uses, the way he uses them, the language is perfect.”
One detail especially impressed Srour and his editor: Markowitz does not understand Arabic, yet still seemed to find the emotional rhythm of scenes from instinct alone.
“What’s really amazing with him is that he doesn’t understand the language, Arabic,” Srour said. “Me and Naaman Bishara, the editor, were going crazy – how the hell will he understand when to move the shot?”
Even without understanding the words, he said, “he went in at the right moment.”
Markowitz was equally emphatic about the production team Srour assembled. Speaking about the Arab and Palestinian crew members who worked on the project, he said, “I never worked with a better crew, other than maybe in Budapest.”
They were, he said, “incredible,” with a kind of versatility born of necessity: “Each person would do the other’s job.”
That flexibility mattered because Fadia was made under pressure and in two distinct forms.
Srour conceived it both as a serialized television work and as a feature film, with the series version running longer and the feature cut moving at a faster pace.
Markowitz became deeply involved in shaping the feature version, and said he did not want the project “to die on the vine as a TV series.”
His approach to the material was blunt and unsentimental. “My purpose is to make the audience uncomfortable,” he said of one of the film’s most harrowing sequences. “Never give anything away. Let it unravel.”
Fadia had emerged into an unusually fraught international environment for works tied in any way to Israel and Palestinians – one in which identity, labeling, and political sensitivity can complicate normal festival and distribution channels.
Both Srour and Markowitz described the film as moving through a cautious cultural marketplace.
Markowitz said the team encountered resistance almost immediately, describing a landscape in which “you write Israel on the application, goodbye,” and where there were “no sales agents, no distributors, nothing.”
Srour described a related frustration from the filmmaker’s side: “Everybody put my identity as they want,” he said.
That tension extended even to the film’s festival identity. Srour, who said he preferred to be identified as Palestinian-Israeli, noted that the Monaco application listed Israel as the main production and “Palestine as a co-production.”
He added that Fadia has versions with Arabic, Hebrew, English, and French subtitles, reflecting the filmmakers’ effort to help the film travel across audiences despite a challenging political climate.
If Fadia has already made one thing clear, it is that Srour did not set out to make a film that could be easily filed away as either a message picture or political symbol.
He made it, he said, to confront violence against women in a society that too often responds with silence.
The early awards and the audience’s reaction suggest he has done exactly that – and that the conversation he hoped to start is only beginning.
Source:
www.jpost.com
