Mayor

Don’t be fooled by the generic title of David Osit’s new documentary Mayor. The film is an expertly crafted cinema vérité drama that often plays more like a satirical black comedy (think Armando Iannucci’s improvised political sitcoms The Thick of It and Veep, or the 2005 suspense geothriller Syriana) than a work of direct cinema (a la Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, released this same year). Unfolding across several months in 2017, the picture follows Musa Hadid, the popular but frustrated mayor of Ramallah, the de facto capital of Palestine, located in the central West Bank just 10 miles north of Jerusalem, 

For those unfamiliar with Ramallah, or who only know Palestine through news images or from films like 5 Broken Cameras, the vision of this affluent, cosmopolitan city may surprise. As we watch Hadid engaged in his daily grind, his duties seem not unlike those of any other mayor in any other city—right down to organizing the annual Christmas tree lighting in the city center (Ramallah is officially a Christian city). But as the film progresses we come to understand what it's like to live in and to try to govern a city under occupation.

Hadid does his level best to maintain the peace and keep the city functioning, but the residents and authorities of Ramallah are under strict rules, unable to even build a water processing plant without permission from the Israelis (permission that is rarely granted). Over the course of the film, we see the mayor deal with everything from badly painted schools and the fact he can’t get cable TV in his office, to violent protests and invasive armed soldiers. The film becomes especially timely when Hadid learns of Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a slap in the face to Palestinian’s longstanding claims to the city.

Osit structures his film with a deft hand. Every scene adds a new layer to our understanding of his subject. He eschews the attention-getting techniques used by so many contemporary documentarians in favor of exquisite editing choices that subtly introduce irony, metaphor, and even poetry to the fly-on-the-wall style. Watching Hadid deal with a delegation of well-meaning Germans, trying to improve the city’s new slogan “WeRamallah” (would spaces beside the Rs render this catchphrase more effective?), and making detailed plans for the grand unveiling of an elaborate, Walt Disney Word style fountain in the center of town.

The ambiguous metaphor of this fountain, a beautiful structure that serves no real function other than civic pride, is just one of many subtle visual images on which Osit’s builds his masterful narrative. The combination of such sharp filmmaking with such an engaging title subject makes Mayor one of the year’s finest documentaries—one you’ll want to revisit.