Defining moments

Samia Nkrumah speaks to the organisers of the first Ramallah International Film Festival

The organisers of the first film festival ever held in Ramallah, in the occupied Palestinian territories, are close to finalising the programme of the Ramallah International Film Festival (RIFF). The festival, to be held on 14-19 April 2004, is unique in the sense that it will take place against a backdrop of conflict and despite the ongoing, daily disruption of everyday Palestinian lives.

Here in Rome, in the offices of the Association of Italian Independent Directors and Producers (API), Italy's largest association of its kind, Adam Zuabi, the dynamic and determined young Palestinian director of RIFF, talked to Al-Ahram Weekly about the support that RIFF is getting from its European and Palestinian partners, and the challenges the team have faced in organising the event.

Zuabi's background as a constitutional lawyer did not deter him from pursing his early passion for cinema. Having rejected a post-graduate offer in the US, Zuabi worked as assistant director to Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola on several films before conceiving the idea of bringing a large cultural festival into the heart of the Palestinian territories. Bolstered by the conviction that the festival will provided invaluable cultural benefits to a society grappling with political isolation but nevertheless eager for hope, Zuabi persevered until his idea matured into a realistic project with the Italian association's help.

API, which has provided RIFF with a structure in Europe, are now the organisers of the upcoming festival together with Zuabi and his team.
............from Divine Intervention

"At the outset it became clear that RIFF needed a European or international body to set it off. API is basically the platform for us to organise and has been instrumental in helping us break away from the isolation we would have faced inside the Palestinian territories. Having offices in Rome and Ramallah has been a great asset," says Zuabi.

Rossella Mercurio, secretary-general of API, told the Weekly that her association's economic and technical support has also provided an opportunity for cultural exchange between a European organisation and Palestinian manpower. She sees API's collaboration as a means of helping the Ramallah festival get on its feet in its first round but hopes that the festival will become independent in the future

The RIFF team includes eight dedicated people working on a volunteer basis. There are three people in Rome, three in Ramallah and two curators, one responsible for Palestinian films and another for films from the Middle East and North Africa.

"Another thing we realised quite early is that we have a social responsibility to our people. We wanted to involve all Palestinians in this project. We didn't just want to show 30 odd films and stop there. So we incorporated a national screenplay competition into the festival. It is the first ever of its kind in the Palestinian areas and a parallel event alongside the film screening programme", said Zuabi.

RIFF launched the competition, together with the Palestinian ministries of education and culture. About 40,000 young people between the ages of 16-18 from 800 schools in the 17 Palestinian districts got involved. Every candidate is required to write a story, which could eventually be developed into a script or an idea for a script based on a single theme -- the moment I grew up.

"Writing about the defining moment of change in their lives is significant for Palestinian children living under the harsh reality of war. This exercise inevitably involves the whole family and the festival will enter each and every Palestinian home," explained the RIFF director.

A jury will select eight stories by the middle of March and the winners will participate in a master-class workshop during the festival's duration, given by well-known filmmakers, who will help to turn the stories into scripts. The feedback from the schools has been one of heartening enthusiasm.

Other projects that are due to take place during the festival are a children's animation class involving kids from the refugee camps, and roundtable forums and professional seminars to foster understanding and encourage collaboration between Palestinians and Europeans in the cinema industry.

In its first round in April 2004, RIFF will feature films from Europe, specifically Britain, France, Italy and Spain, as well as films from Arab countries. The Lebanese film, The Kite, directed by Randa Chahal Sabbag, and that won the Silver Lion award at the last Venice film festival, is one of the films expected to shown. There will also be a special section dedicated to Palestinian cinema. For the benefit of a wider Palestinian audience, foreign films will have subtitles in Arabic. From Italy award-winning directors and producers like Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Marco Tulio Giordana, and Mario Monicelli, who are also API members, are planning to attend. From outside Italy, Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, British actress Vanessa Redgrave, and from Palestine Elia Suliaman, director of Divine Intervention, are all expected to join the festival.

RIFF defends its position of opting for Arab and European participation only. "In Palestine we are very sensitive about Israeli involvement. There is a war still going on. We would have loved to have Israeli participation but you just can't do that now. Not until things are genuinely resolved. The Israelis understand this and they would not want to go to Ramallah at this time," said Zuabi.

(Eliah Sulieman)

He explained that one of the biggest challenges facing the festival is to keep it a purely cultural event.

"This is how we want it to be. We don't want to use it as a peace platform. There's nothing easier than bringing an Israeli and a Palestinian boy together to shake hands and smile at each other. But this relationship doesn't exist, normally. These children don't talk to each other. We don't want propaganda and politics in this festival," insists Zuabi.

The RIFF team does not foresee any difficulty from the Israeli authorities. Inevitably, there will be a time when cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security services will be required, specifically to obtain permits to enter the Palestinian territories.

"But would you need permission to build a hospital?" Zuabi asks rhetorically. "I consider culture a hospital for your soul. You don't need permission to hold a cultural festival or to build a hospital. We're organising this festival and we've invited notable guests. If they want to come, they'll come,"
(Vanessa Redgrave)

Moreover, there is every indication that Palestinians want a distraction from their grim reality. According to Zuabi, the three theatres in Ramallah are working full-time, with three shows a day.

Cooperation could also come from unexpected quarters. This could be the first festival that directly involves the Health Ministry. It is quite possible that ambulances will be used to convey posters, leaflets and relevant mail from one Palestinian district to another to get through checkpoints and border crosses.

Apart from the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Rome Municipality, Spain and Britain are also contributing to the project. The British Council is flying in British guests and arranging their accommodation. The council will also translate into Arabic all British films to be shown at the festival.

Having begun the intricate process of seeking funds to cover the festival's running costs, RIFF is turning to the Arab world and beyond; foundations, banks, philanthropists, private or government agencies, or anyone inspired by the fact that 40,000 Palestinian school children are at this very moment putting the final touches to their own stories.

Divine Intervention: Palestinian Film Satirizes Israeli Occupation

By Pat McDonnell Twair©

Festering humiliation and rage of oppressed Palestinians is the underlying theme of Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention which opened March 14 in eight California theaters (for national playdates, see distributor Avatar Films'

This important film doesn’t offer a haunting love story or characters you would like to have as friends, but it will make you question the filmmaker’s intentions and the absurdities perpetrated by two enemy populations living on the same land.

Suleiman wrote, directed and stars in this black comedy which garnered two awards at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. He never utters a word throughout the biographical film chronicling the life of a filmmaker, E.S., his unrequited affair with a reporter from Ramallah (Manal Khader), the enmity between Nazareth neighbors and the death of his father.

Symbolism is rife in this enigmatic work in which Suleiman portrays the cowed Israeli Arab while his love interest is the defiant Palestinian of the West Bank. We could interpret the disturbing opening scene in which Santa Claus is stabbed by Palestinian boys as Palestinian youth attacking the myth (Santa) of peace the Oslo Accords promised but did not deliver.

The absence of dialogue amplifies the lack of communication between Palestinians and Israelis. The film is a series of absurd situations–a collaborator’s house fire-bombed at night, neighbors throwing garbage in each other’s yards, an Israeli border guard tormenting Palestinian motorists at a checkpoint–that chronicle the grim realities of life under Israeli supremacy.

Suleiman definitely does not show Israeli soldiers in a beneficent light. According to his film notes, he enjoyed auditioning Israeli actors and inquiring if they served in the Israeli Army and how they treated Palestinian civilians.

“The auditioners were put in a very ambivalent position,” Suleiman wrote. “To get the part, the actors had to show their best to the director, meaning that they could convincingly do evil to Palestinians. But then this director is himself a Palestinian; he is one of Them! Meaning–evildoing to Palestinians might not win them the part.”

His notes continue: “I heard a whole lot of stories about liberal, guilt-ridden confessions ‘I only obeyed orders’ to ‘I am defending my country, proud and would do it again’ frankness. At certain moments, I took advantage of my power position. I shifted roles from silent listener to blunt interrogator. I was pained by what they recounted, yet perversely I enjoyed the feeling of uneasiness they experienced. One actor did not serve in the army, and out of my political sentiments I took him instantly. On the set, I had to tone him down as he slightly overacted.”

In one incredible scene, we see a Western tourist ask an Israeli policeman for directions to the Christian quarter of Jerusalem. The amiable cop doesn’t know the way to the Holy Sepulcher but tells the young woman to wait a minute. He walks to the back of his vehicle, pulls out a blindfolded, handcuffed Palestinian prisoner and asks him to give the woman directions.

Much of the film deals with the frustrations of Palestinian Nazarenes–80,000 people living within two square kilometers, where unemployment and Israeli surveillance confine them in a psychological occupation.

If they can’t strike out at Israeli control, they can wage war with each other whether destroying a neighbor’s driveway or taking a knife to a soccer ball that lands on one’s roof.

Fantasy plays a major role, such as the moment E.S. tosses an apricot pit out the window of his car and it ignites an Israeli tank into a hellish inferno.

Life is tedious under occupation, but Palestinians can fantasize.

E.S. and his Ramallah sweetheart cannot be together in Jerusalem so they rendezvous in a parking lot beside a checkpoint on the Nazareth-Ramallah road.

At one point, frustrated by the endless lines of waiting Palestinian cars, Manal steps out of her car. Wearing a tight pink mini dress and stiletto heels, the beautiful woman strides toward the soldiers, they cock their rifles, she lifts her sunglasses and defiantly stares them down. As they watch this vision walk past them, the watchtower collapses.

Is this an incident or just her fantasy?

The infuriating silence of this film is finally broken in a scene in which Israeli soldiers shoot at cardboard targets of a female guerrilla. She comes to life and in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fashion, twirling above them. They spray bullets at her, which form a spinning halo around her head.

The kafiyeh-clad whirling Ninja aims crescent-shaped dart, rocks and grenades and wipes out the marksmen. Only their commander is left. Protected by a gold shield in the shape of Palestine, the woman warrior takes out the commander and a hovering helicopter gunship.

On one occasion as E.S. and Manal sit in his car, he inflates and releases a red balloon bearing a decal of Yassir Arafat’s smiling face. It floats over the checkpoint and the soldiers raise their rifles. A sergeant phones his superiors, asking: “There’s a balloon trying to get through. Can we take it down?”

It’s too late. The Arafat balloon floats toward the Dome of the Rock where it peacefully circles the beautiful golden monument.

Divine Intervention is not one of the entries in the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign-language Film category on March 28. It won Best Foreign Film at the 2002 European Film Awards, the Jury Prize and International Film Critics Prize at Cannes and the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discouraged the film’s producer from submitting Divine Intervention for Oscar consideration because Palestine is not a state it recognizes in its rules. However, it does accept works from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Puerto Rico.

Technically, the film should be an Israeli entry since Suleiman is from Nazareth and is an Israeli citizen. It was filmed in the West Bank and on a military base in France.

Suleiman already is writing his next film in his Paris apartment. As he continues to earn more and more accolades, the Academy may just have to create a special category for his unique style. Divine Intervention could prove to be a classic that film buffs will analyze and discuss for decades.

This is the first Palestinian film to receive a full American release.