‘I would love to tell you that we are an award-winning anti-capitalist performance art group inspired by BDSM and anti-authoritarian dystopian aesthetics, but this would of course be interpreted as a highly political statement.’ – Hatari singer Klemens, speaking to a reporter at Eurovision 2019

This was the situation band Hatari found themselves in during Eurovision 2019. As Iceland’s representatives at the contest, they were caught by an Israeli contradiction: one that forbade them from being ‘political’ on the platform of a country that had recently committed war crimes.

After performing their song ‘Hate will prevail’ (Hatrið mun sigra), Eurovision fans probably know them as the Icelanders who flashed a Palestinian flag during the points section. But Anna Hildur’s new documentary, which follows the run-up to this moment, shows their story to be so much more.

A Song Called Hate (2021) explores the complexities of cultural expression in opposing Palestinian occupation, challenging a world which prevents art from being political, and ultimately, exposing Eurovision’s attempts to undermine any challenge to the status quo. In this case, it just took an anti-capitalist BDSM band from Iceland to rupture Eurovision’s fiction.

100 million people watch 43 countries participate in Eurovision every year. Its 2019 edition was controversial from the start: just two days after Israel’s Netta Barzilai won in May 2018 (the victorious country hosts the next year), the Trump administration moved its US Embassy to Jerusalem, effectively recognising the city as Israel’s capital in lieu of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. In response, Palestinian protests raged along the Gaza Border. There were over 150 deaths and at least 10,000 injuries by Israeli Sniper Fire. These attacks by the IDF were characterised by Amnesty as war crimes.

So when Netta exclaimed ‘I love my country… Next time in Jerusalem!’ on the Eurovision stage, the competition found itself in one of the most complicated geo-political environments in the world – a far cry from its motto of ‘unity, diversity and inclusivity’. The platform gave Israel a chance to appeal to European and queer audiences: it was no wonder Netanyahu lauded Netta as ‘doing exceptional foreign relations work’.

Hatari’s journey to Eurovision commenced a few months later. The experimental brainchild of cousins Klemens Hannigan and Matthías Haraldsson, later joined by Einar Stefánsso and others, saw the contest as a way to engage in the unexpected as purveyors of Reykjavik’s underground scene.

When they won Iceland’s competition for the Eurovision entry with ‘Hate will Prevail’—a not-so-subtle reference to their political stance on the contest—this ‘joke’ became a tangible opportunity to cause creative havoc. After all, not many Eurovision songs put crushing industrial BDSM-techno to the lyrics ‘Europe is collapsing… the void demands everyone’. This was the point that Icelandic film producer Anna Hildur stepped in, creating her first documentary by charting Hatari’s journey.

As the film’s protagonists, Hatari tread the waters between the unflinchingly sincere and, at times, overtly pretentious – an example of which might be claiming Eurovision as their next step towards overthrowing capitalism. But take all this with a pinch of salt. Klemens recognises the surrealism of their style as a reaction to ‘the frustration of living in a normalised society, which is completely and utterly absurd’. Their approach is, above all, a reaction to the farcical logic of the competition: how is challenging Netenyahu to a game of Icelandic trouser grip wrestling, as Hatari did, any stranger than holding a contest about unity in a country upholding apartheid?

The choice to perform at the contest rather than boycotting it went against the line of the international pro-Palestinian community, a contradiction of which they were aware. As Matthías recognises in the documentary, ‘We’ve claimed to be campaigning for all these noble causes, yet we were on this hysterically absurd track’.

The film asks whether participation can make a different kind of statement. Rather than boycotting, Hatari absorbed the attention of the Eurovision bubble like a leather-clad sponge, spotlighting the occupation at every turn. Most significantly, the film follows their collaboration with Queer Palestinian musician Bashar Murad in creating the song ‘KLEFI/SAMED’.

Despite many attempts by the government to locate it in Jerusalem, the competition was eventually held in Tel Aviv. Israel spent the run-up to Eurovision constructing a fantasy, with ‘Dare to Dream’ as its slogan; KAN, Israel’s national TV broadcaster, was able to get away with saying things like ‘over the past twenty years we’ve raised the bar on freedom’ on the BBC, and Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai proclaimed it ‘a city based on the values of tolerance, freedom and human rights, which accepts everyone and is open to the world’ at the Eurovision host insignia. These values are of course not extended to the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

A Song Called Hate permeates this bubble by bringing Palestinians back into focus. Hatari spent their time in Israel and Palestine unlike any other act, visiting Hebron, East Jerusalem, and Ramallah with Bashar. In Hebron, they witness the division of streets to which their Icelandic passports grant them access while their Palestinian tour guide Adballah Maraka is blocked. The barbed windows of the Arab inhabitants are the backdrop to their tense interactions with IDF soldiers in illegal settlement areas.

As Hatari visit the Aida refugee camp, the audience sees the slow violence of occupation that punctuates Palestinian lives between checkpoints and other bureaucratic barriers. The resilience of those they meet is clear, too, including Palestinian poet Ahmad Yacoub, academic Dr Uri Davis, and queer fashion designers tRASHY CLOTHING. The solidarity between these BDSM-clad Icelandic popstars and Palestinians undermines popular pinkwashing narratives about Palestine, which place it in binary opposition to Israel as the self-proclaimed ‘most gay-friendly place in the Middle East’. As Bashar told Owen Jones in a recent interview, ‘Israeli planes don’t know whether you’re gay or not if they’re trying to bomb you.’

This solidarity sits in deep contrast to Jon Ola Sand, CEO of Eurovison, who in telling Hatari that they were over the line for discussing ‘the A word’ (apartheid) claims that the ‘bubble we create’, must be ‘free of politics’. Eurovision’s demand for an artificially apolitical space is best rebutted when Israel’s only ever Palestinian Eurovision contestant, Mira Awad, speaks to Hatari backstage. ‘Everything is politics,’ she says. ‘If it’s Pesach (Passover) and I go to the shop, I cannot buy bread… that is politics.’ To refuse politics is shown to be a privilege: those living under the occupation do not have that luxury.

We also see that the history of inclusion and exclusion at the contest is intimately linked with that of Bashar. His family ran a campaign to include Palestine in 2013 (not so bizarre when you count Australia as a contender), which resulted in the Palestinian flag being banned from the contest. Evidently some flags are more political than others.

The film continues through the claustrophobic run-up to the final, as the band deliberate their willingness to protest and wonder what they have done already is enough. Bashar has a very real fear of being ostracised from his community in Palestine for collaborating with a band that failed to materialise their claim to solidarity; Hatari, in contrast, have the luxury of going home and continuing to make music regardless.

The final is the climax of the film: pressure mounts as the camera follows Hatari through swathes of interviews, each more bizarre than the last. At last they execute their now infamous gesture, bringing out a Palestinian flag—smuggled in from Ramallah by friends the night before—during the final points section to audible boos from the audience. The Icelandic Broadcasting authority were fined €5,000 for the act, and the clip was removed from official Eurovision streams. In the end, it turns out, very little was needed to upset the establishment—a flash of a flag is barely a revolution—but the gesture is imbued with particular meaning in a place devoid of any.

Bashar continues to oppose Israeli occupation through art, and was recently involved in the protests that fought evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, his home city. This year has seen yet more bloodshed at the hands of the Israeli occupiers in Palestine, meaning Hatari’s is a timely story to tell.

This documentary’s defining message is that politics is not easily confined. Whether or not the organisers like it, events like Eurovision are major political statements, offering legitimacy and authority to some and refusing both to others in the eyes of the world. A Song Called Hate powerfully articulates the the other side of Eurovision 2019, raising the voices of Palestine, its music, its poets, its politicians, its fashion designers, and its flags. You should watch it.