Far From Maine

Roy Cohen’s Far From Maine is a documentary that refuses the audience the comfort of taking the “right” position and being done with it. Structured as a letter to his Palestinian friend Aseel Aslih, killed by Israeli police in 2000, it opens with a sentence that many documentaries circling the post-October 7 attack reality still avoid stating so bluntly. “Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.” The statement is not treated as a climax or a dare. It is placed as the substrate of a shared reality, the minimum ground on which anything harder can be said without sliding into moral theatre.

Cohen’s formal gambit is deceptively simple. He uses footage and recorded traces of Aseel to construct something like a dialogue separated by a quarter of a century. Aseel asks questions Cohen can only answer 25 years later. Cohen asks questions that Aseel, in effect, already answered long ago. Time becomes the work’s engine and its antagonist. What does 25 years do to a person? What does it do to a country for which that same span represents a third of its existence?

The title refers to the peace camp in Maine where the two met as teenagers. The documentary is unsentimental about the liberal faith in “dialogue”. It treats the camp not as a triumph of coexistence but as a laboratory where contradictions of identity and power are exposed early, then tested by adult reality. Its sharpest institutional episode revolves around Aseel’s status there. Ethnically Palestinian and Muslim, but carrying an Israeli passport, he is placed inside the Israeli delegation, alongside a separate Palestinian delegation and others without Israeli citizenship. In that arrangement, inclusion is already a trap. You are invited into representation on the condition that you perform loyalty to the state’s story.

Aseel refuses that performance. He will not sing the Israeli anthem, an ethno state anthem whose language centers “Jewish spirit”, and that refusal becomes a fault line. He is not invited back by the Israeli delegation. Later, in present day conversations, one of the Israeli delegation leaders speaks of him with a smallness that reveals how quickly institutions turn moral disobedience into a character defect. Yet the camp itself is so impressed by Aseel’s clarity and force that it invites him back anyway, not as part of a delegation but as a delegate of one, a person deemed exceptional enough to represent himself when the categories break down.

That phrase is not inspirational branding. Cohen uses it as a measuring stick and, ultimately, as an indictment of himself. Aseel could withstand the social penalties of refusing the anthem while still insisting on dialogue. Cohen suggests he has not managed the same solitary courage in the decades since. He is honest about the ways he has been shaped politically, emotionally, linguistically by Israeli society’s gravitational pull, and about how difficult it is to go against collective reflexes even when you can name, plainly, that wrong is being done.

Relative to post October 7 works centered on Israeli subjects, such as Coexistence, My Ass!, Holding Liat, and Children No More, “Were and Are Gone”, Cohen’s documentary can feel strangely low friction. It does not court confrontation. At its best, that calm is a virtue, a refusal of performative heat, a commitment to staying inside a relationship rather than harvesting outrage. At its weakest, the same restraint risks reading as an optic of safety, less an aesthetic than a hedge, especially when the subject itself is a furnace that typically melts politeness on contact. It lives in that tension, and it is honest enough not to resolve it.

There is also a gap some viewers will feel. This work is less interested in diagramming the institutional production of Israeli consensus than in tracing what that consensus does to a person over time. But that intimacy is also its accusation, and its single use of self-reproach feels earned rather than decorative. It asks what it means to live with knowledge you can say out loud, and still fail, most days, to become a delegate of one.

Reviewed on: 31 Jan 2026