6/06/16

Where creativity, ethics and the heart all come together

Posted by Shohini Chaudhuri

The documentary Open Bethlehem lends a fresh angle on storytelling about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – through tourism. Director Leila Sansour and Middle Eastern studies researcher Ryvka Barnard tell us what is compelling about this approach.

In Open Bethlehem, director Leila Sansour returns to her hometown Bethlehem in 2004 after a long absence. The town is being encircled by the Israeli Separation Wall which imprisons the residents and isolates them from the rest of the world. Sansour plans to stay just one year to make a film about the Wall but, in a decision that changes the course of her life and the film she is making, she launches a campaign to open up the city. She ends up shooting the film over a period of eight years, interweaving her personal story with the story of the campaign.

At first, the international donors that she approaches want to avoid being “overtly political”. “So what were we supposed to say we were doing?” Sansour wonders. Cut to a shot of the campaign placard: “The Open Bethlehem Tourism Project”.

Yet tourism, initially adopted as a cover for the campaign, is soon revealed to be a key issue amongst Bethlehem’s residents, as many depend on it for their livelihoods. Since the building of the Wall, numbers of tourists have dwindled and most of them arrive on Israeli-organised tours to be whisked around the Nativity Church before leaving – often unaware that they are, in fact, visiting Palestine.

Sansour says a cocktail of different elements inspired her to make this film. With the repressions that followed the Second Intifada (2000-2005), “it became difficult to stay away from the situation altogether. There was a force that made me want to be more Palestinian than I was.”

Born in Moscow to a Palestinian father and Russian mother, she moved with her family to Bethlehem as a child when her father was invited to found Bethlehem University. Having left as a teenager, she felt she had lost a link with her country that she wanted to reinstate. “My father was a big inspiration in my life but Bethlehem was where we parted ways. When he died, I realised I had never invested properly in the things that he cared about so much”.

As a filmmaker, Sansour knew she could tackle the subject in an interesting way: “creativity, a sense of ethics and where your heart is all came together”. Open Bethlehem is, first and foremost, a personal story, movingly evoking her childhood and relationship with her father through home movie footage.

The film is also filled with humour which, like tourism, may not be an obvious choice of approach to crisis. Yet, in Palestine, humour is a vital strategy for dealing with the Israeli occupation’s bleak realities. “No matter what hard times we go through, humour is part of the make-up of commentary and reflection on the world around us,” Sansour explains. The absurdity of the occupation itself provides material for humour. “People are humorous as the situation is unfolding in front of them all the time, so they always have that strange, situational humour going on”.

As Ryvka Barnard, an expert on the politics of tourism in Palestine, remarks, “We think of tourism so often as a non-politicised space”. Open Bethlehem is playful with this idea, and subtly challenges it. “As the film unfolds, you start to see how every piece of tourism is a politicised sphere in Palestine. It’s a really beautiful way to introduce the concept and open up a range of topics: the violence of the occupation, questions about home and exile, questions about positionality”.

Growing up in an American-Jewish household, Barnard went on trips to Israel as a child without realising that she was travelling into Palestinian territory – that was how the tours were designed. “They didn’t present different territories. There was no conversation about what the land was before the State of Israel. We moved in and out of the West Bank seamlessly”. This gave the impression that the entire territory was Israeli space and, additionally, “for Zionist tourists, that it all belongs to you, even if you have no particular connection to the place”.

Later on, when she became politicised, Barnard returned to the same places as an anti-Zionist activist and tour guide for other activists, experiencing those places completely differently. “It was my first understanding of what it meant to move between different spaces”, a routine experience for Palestinians barred from travelling to places that Jewish Israelis and foreign tourists are free to go.

One reason why tourism lends an illuminating perspective is the significance of maps. “As a tourist, the first thing you do is look at the map to see where you’re going”, says Barnard. “That’s already a politicised issue, because it depends on what map you’re looking at”. To create the Israeli state, the Zionist project overlaid its map onto historic Palestine. It tried to forge links with biblical lands through acts of renaming that erased the past’s complex layers in favour of an exclusively Jewish one. “In tourism, we have very simple contemporary examples of how Israel continues to do that”. In particular, tourist maps help to normalise the Jewish settlement presence in the West Bank.

Open Bethlehem powerfully conveys this aspect in its scenes about Rachel’s Tomb. Built in Bethlehem on the site where the biblical matriarch Rachel is said to have died, Rachel’s Tomb has been cordoned off from the rest of the town and claimed as the Jewish state’s exclusive property – part of an ongoing attempt to take over more land and turn it into Israel.

Along with the construction of the Wall and settlements, Israel has appropriated large areas of the Bethlehem District, transforming them into nature reserves, closed military zones, Jewish-only highways and other areas off-limits to Palestinians. “We’re trying to raise awareness and sensitivity to what it means to destroy or lose a city like this”, Sansour says. “But also to make it speak for the rest of Palestine and the dangers and challenges that Palestinians face today.”

The Open Bethlehem campaign is part of a growing alternative tourism industry that uses tourism to highlight or counteract the effects of the occupation. “We wanted to promote intelligent visits to Bethlehem to allow people more insight, and genuinely more interaction with the reality, society and community in Bethlehem. And to promote visits from the political establishment in the West, to try and bring the issue high up on the agenda”.

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in exploring Palestinian identity and history through heritage as well as art and film. As a case in point, Barnard mentions this year’s opening of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. While there has been a long history of exploring these issues through Palestinian art, “questions of the future are looming very intensely”. The renewed interest in tourism and heritage is part of an attempt to grapple with that.

Open Bethlehem will be screening at The Mosaic Rooms on 8 June, 2016, 6.30pm. This is the second event in The Mosaic Rooms’ series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.

To book tickets, click here.

31/05/16

“I want to go back and film”: Maysoon Pachachi on A Candle for the Shabandar Café

Posted by Shohini Chaudhuri

“Creativity is a response to the ‘un-making’ of the world, when the pavement is crumbling under your feet and you no longer recognise the people around you”, says Maysoon Pachachi, a London-based Iraqi filmmaker with extensive experience of working on the frontline of war and occupation. She and her colleague Kasim Abid taught documentary filmmaking in Jerusalem, Gaza and Ramallah, before setting up the Independent Film and Television College in their native Baghdad and producing A Candle for the Shabandar Café, one of the shorts screened at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City, earlier last month. In a special interview for The Mosaic Rooms, Maysoon Pachachi tells of her experiences working in Baghdad and the background to the film.

What was the inspiration behind the film school in Baghdad?

There was one point when I was teaching in Ramallah, with tanks on the streets and curfews every night. We were inspired by how much difference it made to the students being able to actually put thoughts and feelings on the screen in a situation like that. So, in 2003, we were in Ramallah, sitting in a café having a coffee and we went, ‘OK, Iraq has been invaded and is under occupation, what can we do?’ We are not something useful, like doctors or engineers to rebuild the country. Our experience in Palestine gave us a lot of encouragement to try and do the same sort of a thing, to set up a free-of-charge school to teach basic cinema skills.

Of course, we had grand plans at the beginning but, because of the security situation, which got increasingly worse, and because of the funding, we really operated in a very minimal way and very stop-start. At one point, at the height of sectarian tension, people were getting kidnapped from the building. There was an explosion that went off nearby and the glass on the building shattered many times and the students couldn’t get in, or somebody in their families got kidnapped and killed. In fact, this is what happened to Kasim’s brother.

We’d been outside the country for a very long time, both of us, and we didn’t want to do what we saw a lot of people doing. People who lived outside went back and tried to tell the Iraqis what to do. I really didn’t want to do that. So when Kasim went back to visit his family, he started talking to people and asking if there was an interest. And people said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, come, we really need this’. Because of the sanctions, there’d been no access to digital equipment, there’d been no access to video equipment, there were no film labs. And the cameras they had were very antiquated. If something went wrong, there was no way of getting replacement parts during the sanctions, so filmmaking more or less stopped.

How did you get around the problem, which you saw elsewhere, of people from outside imposing their way of working? How did you try to enable the filmmakers to tell their own stories?

That was absolutely a pillar of the way we were working – to help them make the films they wanted to make. So they would come to us with ideas, then we would discuss with them: ‘What is the core of this film, why do you want to do it, what’s important about this, what sort of thing can actually tell a story?’ Then came the logistics, a big issue because they were shooting in dangerous circumstances. People would set up, do all the research and then suddenly that area becomes incredibly dangerous, closed off, full of checkpoints and militias, and they would have to stop and do something else. Or the central person of the film would suddenly get kidnapped or have to leave the country in 24 hours. So there was a lot of chopping and changing like that. In the end, especially in 2006, 2007, 2008, when the situation got really dangerous, they found themselves really having to work in a situation of familiarity instead of launching further out to the society, which is what they wanted to do. They would have to make something more personal, around their neighbourhood, around people that they knew and trusted, that was the truth of the situation.

Can you tell us about your involvement in A Candle for the Shabandar Cafe?

Well, it was one of the films on the 2007 documentary course. [The director] Emad Ali wanted to do a historical film about the culture of Iraq. Shabandar Café is in the old part of town, the area where the Ottomans had their headquarters and barracks. It opened in 1917, and was always the place where people came to discuss literature and politics. The whole place is redolent with the history of modern Iraq. So this is what Emad was initially making the film about. And it’s near Al-Mutanabbi Street, the street of bookshops, another institution at the heart of the culture of the city. That’s where, in 2007, a bomb went off, and the film covers that.

One night [in December 2006], a mortar fell on Emad’s house and killed his wife and his father. I mean, you can imagine he was in a terrible state. He just stopped doing everything on the film. When the bomb went off [in Al-Mutanabbi Street], which was in March, we weren’t in Iraq at the point and he rang us and said, ‘I want to go back and film’. Kasim said to him, ‘OK, be very careful’. He thought it was a good idea because it was pulling him out of his psychological collapse and depression. He told him to take a camera that would not attract anybody’s attention and to be very careful and aware of his surroundings, to shoot and get out of there. And Emad went and got some great footage for the café and what was going on. When he was leaving, he was attacked by two people with hidden faces in an unnumbered car.

We brought the students out of Iraq to Damascus to edit their films. [Due to his injuries from the attack] Emad was unable to walk and travel, so students on his course edited the film for him and it was submitted to several festivals, including the Gulf film festival in Dubai and it won a prize there. [As a result of winning a prize at Dubai] Emad was able to have his medical treatment and a month of rehabilitation there. Then he went back to Baghdad and made another film, about press freedom in Iraq. When somebody from a Dutch TV company came in 2010 and interviewed him, she said to him, ‘Why did you carry on?’ He said, ‘Because if I didn’t, they’d have won.’

The film school in Baghdad has closed, after running for ten years, but do you still have links to people from there?

Yes, I’ve got links with Emad and several other people that were there. In fact, when I was in Baghdad recently, doing some auditions for something that I am working on, the person who came and filmed the auditions was one of our students in 2010.

A Candle for the Shabandar Café was screened at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City at The Mosaic Rooms on May 18. This was the first event in the series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.

The next screening, Politicising Tourism in Palestine, will be held at The Mosaic Rooms on June 8, at 6.30pm. To book tickets click here.

18/05/16

Hidden Outside, but Not Hidden Inside

Posted by Shohini Chaudhuri

In the face of occupation, constant threat of violence and scarce resources, filmmakers from Gaza and Iraq are creating wry, intimate, insider’s portraits of their war-torn circumstances

A new slant on life in Gaza as a ‘culture of hiding’ is offered in Kamkameh, one of eight Arab shorts featured in Space and Memory in the War-Torn City. At a time when Gaza is increasingly hidden from the outside world through fortified fences and travel restrictions, Kamkameh records the filmmakers’ experience of walking around the territory and reflects on how life under blockade and continual military assaults by Israel have weighed on Gaza’s people.

A debut film by two women directors, Areej Abu Eid from An-Nuseirat and Eslam Elayan from Rafah, Kamkameh will screen in the UK for the first time. It is produced by Shashat Women’s Cinema, an NGO based in Ramallah led by Alia Arasoughly, which is dedicated to supporting women filmmakers and holds the longest-running annual women’s film festival in the Arab world. Shashat has received awards for its excellence from the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and has been recognised for its inspiring practice by EUROMED.

Shashat has screened films in Gaza since 2006, as part of its annual women’s film festival, then began training women filmmakers there in 2011. ‘We realised that we had a responsibility to train young women filmmakers in Gaza as we did in the West Bank, and that it was necessary for Gazan women to be filmmakers to express their reality,’ says Arasoughly. ‘We had a lot of problems bringing in equipment and trainers because of the siege. We relied on Gazan film professionals for the day-to-day training and followed up on email, Skype and Vimeo for feedback and mentoring and monitoring.’

Abu Eid and Elayan were among the first to take part in the training programme. What made them choose this theme and approach? ‘It’s the way that we are living in Gaza and had to be spotlighted in a film’, states Abu Eid. Previously, daily life in Gaza wasn’t like that, she says. People have been affected by their circumstances through the years, including the blockade. As a result, both the culture of the community and people’s individual outlooks have changed. ‘People start to feel comfortable this way, because they can do whatever they want through hiding: “we are hidden outside, but not hidden inside”. It’s kind of contradictory, I know. Kamkameh is showing this concept.’

Arasoughly, who produced the film, highlights its strengths: ‘I love the subjective and moody nature of it … it takes one theme and looks at Gazan reality through it and what comes across is a very heart-breaking expression of how living in a state of siege externally, the Israeli siege of Gaza, manifests itself internally – what Fanon referred to as the internalisation of oppression.’

The title Kamkameh relates to the culture of hiding. ‘Literally, it means huddling tightly together to the point where individuation becomes impossible, implying it is hidden, covered …’ explains Arasoughly. ‘The point is the covered part that people can’t see from outside’, Abu Eid adds.

Shashat is currently preparing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its women’s film festival. Its next project is a series of productions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip taking ‘the theme of “What’s Tomorrow” to give voice and expression to Palestinian youth despair.’ Abu Eid herself intends to work with Shashat for her next film.

Life under US-led occupation in Iraq is given wonderful comic touches in War Canister, produced by the award-winning Leeds-based production company Human Film. Andy Guy of Human Film explains: ‘During Saddam’s regime, arts and culture in Iraq were strictly censored to ensure a certain level of “cooperation” with the politics of the time.’ When the dictator was toppled, ‘filmmaking, or creative arts in general, were practically non-existent. The coalition invasion plunged the country further into turmoil, but now people are learning to create once again.’

Human Film joined forces with Iraqi filmmakers Mohamed Al-Daradji and Oday Rachid, who set up the Iraqi Independent Film Center (IIFC) in Baghdad to meet production needs and teach and inspire a new generation of filmmakers. ‘Iraq has had a very troubled past, but it is our hope that we can begin to change that through initiatives such as this. We saw an opportunity to make a real change.’ Students at the IIFC are encouraged to ‘tell real-life stories’, particularly about children growing up in Iraq and their daily struggles. ‘It is ever more important to show the world the issues people face in Iraq and, for us, filmmaking is the best way to communicate these stories.’

In War Canister, the fuel shortage in Iraq is dramatised through the stories of children. The protagonist is a ten-year-old deaf boy, who steals an oil canister to help his struggling family. The script and production evolved at a short film workshop at the IIFC under Al-Daradji’s supervision. ‘Mohamed Al-Daradji decided on a set of rules to be followed in each film: all scenes had to be shot using a static camera, no music was allowed in the montage, and the film actors had to be non-professional’ – rules that director Yahya Al-Allaq believes contributed to the film’s success.

When I ask him what made him decide on comedy as an approach to the subject matter, Al-Allaq replies: ‘The truth is that I like comedy and particularly black comedy. Through black comedy we poke fun at our problems and we produce them in a comic way.’ In one scene, the deaf boy boards a bus and becomes friends with the bus conductor, a boy of a similar age who suddenly bursts into song to their (and our) mutual delight.

The profoundly moving dimensions of this comedy are enhanced when you hear the back-story. When he was casting actors, Al-Allaq went to the orphanage in Baghdad. ‘After a few auditions, I chose two children, Sharaf and Ahmed [who play the bus conductor and deaf boy, respectively], and I trained them to improve their performance. After the training, Sharaf asked me: “Is this film going to be in the cinema, is everyone going to watch it?” I said, “Yes”. The child said: “I composed a song – can you put it in the film?”’ When asked what motivated him to compose the song, he replied: ‘I miss my mother everyday. She left us here in the orphanage. I wish for her to hear my song, wherever she is. Maybe then nostalgia will pull her back to me, so she can take me back and I get to sleep in her arms once again.’ With that, Al-Allaq decided he had to include the song in the film.

Al-Allaq is now working on his first feature film, called Amerli, which follows two children on the run after ISIS destroys their hometown, Mosul in North Iraq, and murders their parents. He is currently at development stage, seeking funds to shoot in Iraq next year.

Kamkameh and War Canister will be screening at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City at The Mosaic Rooms on 18/5/16, 6.30pm. This is the first event in the series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.

14/05/16

“Storytelling through animation is my medium” Jalal Maghout, Director of Suleima

Posted by Shohini Chaudhuri

In his stunning animated short Suleima, director Jalal Maghout presents a portrait of a Syrian opposition activist, based on an anonymous woman’s real-life testimony. A Syrian currently living in Berlin, Jalal has a background in making short animated films. Here he offers his personal perspectives on the making of Suleima, his first foray into animated documentary, which will screen for the first time in England at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City, at The Mosaic Rooms.

What motivated you to make this film?

I was so touched by the story of this lady, so I wanted to have more space where I can be able to express myself more especially in the common feeling and thoughts between me and her. The main thing about her is that she is not a known personality from the official opposition, but an ordinary woman who can reflect the situation of thousands of people who are working and helping others anonymously.

How did you create the character of Suleima?

All I had was a voice recording of her telling the story confidently. It was enough to build an image of an ordinary, nondescript woman, who trusts her abilities and values. Not forgetting that any kind of reference to her real character will put her in a real dangerous situation since she is still active till now in the humanitarian field in Syria.

Could you talk about your choice and use of animation to tell a story of political oppression and evoke a war-torn place?

Watching us stuck in ignorance, injustice and pain gave me a push to do something to raise my voice and to say, ‘No more!’ And storytelling through animation is my medium. It is the way I react to life. For me, animation is an effective medium to depict an unattainable situation, for example, our memories, fantasies and dreams – the people whom we cannot meet in person and the places we cannot visit, and of course, in this case, to protect the persons who are involved in the film.

On the other hand, ‘animadoc’ is a new genre for me, which I wanted to experiment with. The most fascinating point about this genre is that you can be less loyal to the documentary material you have. You are free to add and create from your artistic view.

Suleima will be screening at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City at The Mosaic Rooms on 18/5/16, 6.30pm. This is the first event in the series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.

12/05/16

Video: The 2016 Edward W. Said London Lecture – Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World by Naomi Klein

We have just released the recording of this year’s lecture in memory of Edward Said, held by award-winning scholar, activist and author Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein is the author of the critically acclaimed international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate which was one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year.

In her lecture, Klein discussed the “climate crisis and the central role that systems that rank the relative value of human beings – including but not limited to White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Orientalism – have played in deepening that crisis”, calling for immediate action. By challenging the powers of major environmental polluters, including corporations and governments, she demands that we start making life on earth liveable not just for some of us, but for all.

Watch the full lecture here:

The lecture was followed by questions from the audience, chaired by Shami Chakrabarti:

The 2016 Edward W. Said London Lecture was presented by A.M. Qattan Foundation/The Mosaic Rooms, the Southbank Centre and London Review of Books.

The lecture took place at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre.

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