Far from Maine
**Seen for the 2026 Atlanta Film Festival
A personal documentary, where the filmmaker puts themselves at the center of the narrative- while also telling a larger story- is always going to be a tricky thing to pull off. I think Roy Cohen does a good job here, but either one part of the narrative or the other loses focus at times during this 99 minute film. That doesn’t mean that “Far from Maine” lacks value, however; just focus.
Cohen is a gay man living in Tel Aviv with his partner and their adopted daughter. They moved from the States because Cohen wanted to be near family in his home land. And then, the attacks of October 7 happen, and the war in Gaza takes a catastrophic turn. But not everything happens in a vacuum, and Cohen might have had more than just personal reasons to return. In 2000, a Palestinian friend that he met through a Seeds of Peace conference when they were teenagers that took place in America was murdered by Israeli police. His friend, Aseel, was more ambitious in his activism than the Israeli people who selected him to go that first year, in part due to his own father’s death. Now, Cohen is going back through letters he and Aseel wrote, and he’s finding that the country he returned to is becoming unrecognizable to him.
The emotional throughline in “Far from Maine” is Cohen reconnecting with his memory of Aseel, which includes the aftermath of his death, how no one was held accountable, and how he is at his own personal crossroads with his thoughts on Israel and Palestine. Sometimes, this emotional arc of the film gets lost, and we find ourselves immersed more in the larger issues regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which is definitely important to the narrative, but also diminishes the emotional pull of the story that Cohen is telling. For the film to really land its punches, the balance needed to be stronger. Having said that, “Far from Maine” gives us a compelling look at a man questioning his own beliefs, what he was told growing up, and what type of person he wants to be at a pivotal moment in his country’s history. He goes to visit people from his past, including fellow former Seeds of Peace members. One of them says, “How do we interrupt the pattern without having to just uproot our lives and leave?” That is a question that I feel like all of us have to figure out what the answer to is. Cohen’s film looks to answer it, but sometimes gets tripped up along the way with how to navigate the reasons he asks it to begin with.
