It was on a backstreet in Tel Aviv while shooting her last film, M, that the French documentarian Yolande Sauberman found the subject for La Belle de Gaza (The Beauty of Gaza).

(M would go on to win a César Award (French Oscar) for best documentary

Zauberman was filming three young Arab trans women, one who told her filmmaking partner in Arabic that she walked from Gaza to Tel Aviv. “I thought it was such a nearly impossible path,” recalls Zauberman. “First, to be a man, becoming a woman, coming from Gaza to Tel Aviv, and being a Muslim in Tel Aviv. I really wanted to find this woman and to see how she was seeing the world.”

After losing contact with the woman, Zauberman began searching for her. That journey would become the impetus for — and title of — her latest doc, La Belle de Gaza.

My Book:

Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).

In many ways, it reminiscent of seminal LGBTQ documentaries like Paris Is Burning and Pier Kids.

Shot over the course of a year beginning in 2022, the film’s subjects include women like Nathalie, who is nursed post-gender-affirming surgery by a childhood friend.

Nadine, who grew up in a Bedouin community, talks openly about the dangers she feels as a trans woman in sex work.

The film chronicles the isolation that befall these women, especially within their own conservative families.

“Family is important in every part of the world but in the Middle East especially,” says Zauberman. “So when you become a trans woman, especially if you’re Arabic, it really amounts to a separation most of the time from your family.”

The film was finished before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and the ensuing conflict in Gaza. “I thought we should keep the movie and not release it, so that’s what we did,” says Zauberman of holding back the release of the film, which doesn’t express any political opinions but is inherently politically charged due to its subject during a time of larger tragedy in the region.

At the urging of her filmmaking team, fellow directors and friends like Alice Diop (whose Saint Omer won a jury prize in Venice in 2022), Zauberman screened the film in Paris to get reactions.

The positive response inspired her to release the film. It will be in French theaters after Cannes via Pyramide, which is also handling sales at the Marché.

The film’s subjects will attend the Cannes screening. But the possibility of a release in Israel is still unclear.

That decision, says the director, will be made after Cannes.