Mayor

The daily struggles and surprisingly hopeful moments of contemporary Palestine come to the fore in this portrait of Musa Hadid, the mayor of Ramallah, a Palestinian city surrounded by Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The film follows Hadid as he attends council meetings, visits schools, and listens to citizens’ complaints, all while living under the periodic terror unleashed by the occupying army that surrounds his city. “Our goal is to provide municipal services first, then political messaging,” notes the unruffled Hadid, but that’s difficult when even a Christmas tree in the town square may prove divisive, or when the sewage flowing onto a Ramallah hillside can’t be stopped because it’s coming from an Israeli settlement. An intoxicating combination of Frederick Wiseman, Elia Sulieman, and Veep, Mayor poses an existential question: How do you run a city when you don’t even have a country? “Subtly electrifying . . . deeply affecting. A movie full of vitalizing, delicate observations” (Robert Greene, Sight & Sound).