All about Palestine
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Ramallah Stories
Last week Noé Mendelle was at Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, presenting the best of our STORIES series – short films coming out of intensive documentary workshops we've run with British Council in the Middle East. And it brought back her memories of going to Palestine for the first time for the RAMALLAH STORIES and DOC EXPRESS workshops.
Photo: Isra Odeh
As you may know, in order to reach Palestine, you need to go through Israel.
First thing to do for myself and Flore was to get new passports. Travelling with our stamps from past trips to Libya and Algeria, that will not do. However much you prepare for such trip, it is never enough.
Tel Aviv airport is a spacious and rather subdued space: dull architecture, sparse images and whispered sounds. Of course, extremely well organised and controlled. At passport control, we get questioned about the purpose and destination of the visit before getting allocated a visa. My questioning was brief, and quickly assumptions were made about my "Jewishness" due to my name. Flore on the other hand had to sweat a bit more. It was only at control number 2 that we both realised that had been given different visas. Mine got me through with a smile and a nod, Flore was once again questioned. On the return leg of our journey, it was even more accentuated. Every time, Flore's luggage had to be thoroughly checked, and she got questioned while I was receiving apologies for the delay. At the last check I was swiftly directed to the luggage X-ray for Israeli people while Flore was taken to a different queue, hidden from mine, and once again had to go through the rigmarole of more questioning and checks. Nothing threatening – but by the end of this trip we learned enough about Israeli psychological games at first hand to shift from feelings of sadness about the conflict to anger at this constant reaffirmation of their power and occupation.
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"I cannot be astonished by anything in life"
Roxana Vilk is producer of the POETS IN PROTEST series made by SDI Productions for Al Jazeera English. She's also the director of the episode on Mazen Maarouf: Hand Made.
“It is the mission of how to reconstruct the dirt, this is poetry, maybe to make a rose out of dust.”
That's how Mazen described his role of a poet the first time I interviewed him, back in May 2010 in Lebanon. Those words rang true as we drove through Beirut city, still scarred by so many wars, and he then showed me around the small blown up flat he and his family had lived in as a Palestinian refugees.
However by the time we came to film Mazen in December 2011 for the Poets of Protest Artscape series, things looked very different for him. It was no longer Beirut we were looking at – it was Paris and Reykjavik. Mazen’s journalistic work in Beirut had led to his life being put in grave danger, and he left to Iceland where he was invited to become a guest writer for ICORN as Reykjavik had become a new 'City of Refuge'...
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Ramallah: The Freedom To See
It’s a bar in Ramallah called Beit Aneesh. Apparently named after an old lady that lived there. A laid-back place with posters from the history of the struggle of the Palestinian people. We had just completed a documentary workshop in Ramallah, and Tue Steen Müller, who has helped so many emerging filmmakers from all over the world, suggested anyone who likes joins us for a beer or coffee at eight.
Few have come. Most have long, unpredictable journeys through the occupied territories where they will undoubtedly be stopped several times.
Khaled Jarrar has turned up though – just arrived from France where his work as a radical conceptual artist has become celebrated. We’re so pleased to see him – a filmmaker of huge promise as well as an artist. Tue has just seen the rough cut of his first film which is about the wall. He shows us a scene with him with a tiny chisel, chipping little bits of the wall off. Tue suggests he end his new film like this. It’s a futile act of defiance, made funny by its impotence.
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