The documentary City of Borders centers on a gay bar Shushan in Jerusalem, a place that brings together Palestinians, Jewish Israelis, Arabic Israelis, Jewish Arabs, religious or atheist, queer, straight and drag queens. The bar serves as a place that embraces all conflicts of sexualities, religions, nationalities, geography, and occupation through queer desires and the common human need for belonging. The film itself, however, is not as optimistic as it wants to be. Sa'ar Netanel, a secular Israeli who owns the bar and serves as the first openly gay member of the city council in Jerusalem, has to constantly deals with not only the homophobic threats while he is putting on Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade in 2005 but also homophobic hostilities from mostly orthodox Israeli politicians. The film presents the tension between the two cities- Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. While Tel Aviv portrays itself as the liberal, Capitalist Disneyland for gays, Jerusalem is seen as a sacred land that needs to preserve its tradition and conservatism- which is translated by some orthodoxes as gay bashing.
In this conservative climate of Jerusalem, the film goes in depth to examine an interracial realtionship between a Palestinian-Israeli woman, Samira Saraya , and a Jewish-Israeli woman, Ravit Geva. Saraya, an anti-Zionist activist, speaks for the brutal occupation in Gaza as well as the racism against Palestinians within the supposedly safe, liberal state of Israel that's all about cultural diversity. Geva, even though supportive of her partner Saraya's activism and politics, fails to recognize her privileges as a white Jewish Israeli at times. While Saraya talks about how Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens and have no voice in the society, Geva interrupts and says, "Yes they can speak. There's freedom of speech in Israel!" Saraya quickly responds, "freedom of speech for whom?"
In another tract of the storyline, the film follows the life of Boody, gay and devout Muslim, risks his life by sneaking through the wire from the West Bank to Shushan to perform as a drag queen and, like what he says, "we are just going there to have fun. We are not going there to throw bombs." The film reveals his relationship with his mom, who is aware of his son's sexuality and not accepted, but is supportive to her son in her own way. The portrayal of Boody critics the dominant Western discourse of outness, in which the conflicts of religion and family are often impossible to co-exist with outness. Boody ends up in a small town in Connecticut, where he finds his partner and sees the limitations of queer immigrant rights in the US.
The film also follows the story of a Jewish-Arabic Israeli, Adam Russo, who is stabbed by an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade. A former Israeli soldier and has clear Zionist ideology, Russo is not defeated by the gay-bashing incident and still carries his Israeli flag in Pride. At the end of the film, he is preparing his marriage with another Israeli man and moving into house he just brought in the Israeli settlement in West Bank.
The director of the film, Yun Suh, a first-generation Korean American from California, talked about how her inspiration for making this documentary about the Palestinian-Israeli gay communities was her experience of being an outsider, as an immigrant and a woman of color in the US. Having the privilege to be a documentary maker in the central of the conflict during the war as well as interview these people who might have risked their lives to be on the big screen, Suh fails to use the documentary as a crucial tool to really critic how liberal Zionism portrays Israel as a safe haven for queers but in fact only further justifies Israel as an apartheid state and its continuing siege in Gaza. While the film shows the possibility of love, empathy, and forgiveness can exist among Israelis, Palestinians, queer and straight folks, it fails to take a clear anti-Zionist, anti-Imperialist stance in the midst of some very extreme forms of violence against Palestinians, against people of color, and against queers. After all, queer liberation is not a dance party in the gay bar in Tel Aviv, but a space of justice where every kind of otherness can belong to that we will and must fight for all.
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