Palestinian filmmaker Alia Arasoughly speaks to Negar Azimi about her critically acclaimed film Hay mish Eishi Alia Arasoughly did not plan to make the film that has won her critical acclaim as one of the most provocative voices coming out of Palestine today. Looking out at the city last week on the eve of the Cairo premiere of "This is not Living" (Hay mish Eishi), Arasoughly explains that her chronicle of the experiences of eight women during the last Intifada was wholly instinctual, particularly given the trying circumstances that surrounded her at the time of its production. "It was the only way I could live. Without the film I think I would have died," she says, remembering the frequent street battles, incursions and hostilities she and her crew encountered from start to finish. As a growing number of Palestinian filmmakers are lending their gaze to events in their own country Arasoughly's film may mark a fissure with the rest. Here one encounters voices that are left unheard in the barrage of imagery that the collective consciousness has come to associate with the occupation and its discontents. At a time when occupation has been commodified and aestheticised through the depiction of Hizbullah militants, screaming children and grieving matriarchs, Arasoughly's film pays tribute to a group of unheard voices -- those of middle-class women -- that do not gravitate toward any sensationalised pole. These are exceptional women only insofar as they face exceptional circumstances. "I wanted to tell the stories of women like me, productive women who had lives of their own, women who had struggled to create a professional identity for themselves that has been erased by the war," she adds. All but one of the women portrayed in the film are close acquaintances of Arasoughly's, from the university student who works as her assistant to the head of the network television station whose story provided Arasoughly with the initial impetus to embark on the project. "I was surprised to find her at work late one evening, after having edited the day's news footage. She told me that she couldn't go home to her daughter because of what she had seen that day, she couldn't get the images out of her head," remembers Arasoughly. That was enough to serve as Arasoughly's departure point, to provide the first of the stories she would tell. "That night I couldn't sleep. I wondered why I could not tell her story." The stories flowed in a natural succession, spanning the breadth of female experience in the face of the Intifada: media and theatre professionals, a farming woman, a cleaning woman, a boutique owner, a university student, a teenage girl and housewives are all featured in Arasoughly's video essay. In the end, the fact that these women are Arasoughly's acquaintances, that she has a relationship with each, becomes a strength, defying tendencies toward an abstraction of suffering that characterises media and, at times, documentary coverage. Arasoughly imbues her film with a lyrical dimension, using nature as a metaphorical tool to foreground the destruction wreaked upon these women's lives. Juxtaposed with a funeral scene, the camera pulls up to the rain falling from the sky, leaving one with a feeling that the cosmos is crying. Later, a woman who has known no other life but one of farming, finds that she cannot plant the seeds on which her livelihood depends. In another narrative a boutique owner travels three hours every day to open a shop that never receives customers. Echoing Arasoughly's own sentiments regarding the making of her film the boutique owner tells us that she cannot help but make this journey every day. It is no jump of logic to surmise that Arasoughly's own experience is present, to some extent, within each one of these narratives. There is no shortage of emotional heart tugging throughout Arasoughly's film, while the dramatic score emphasises the Kafkaesque nature of these lives. This is not Living is the only Palestinian film produced during the second Intifada that was filmed in more than one location. No crew has managed to travel the land as Arasoughly's crew has. Starting from a village near Jenin in the north, they would move down, to Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and finally, Beit Jala in the south. But filming was far from easy. Every other shooting was cancelled upwards of 10 times -- whether because of a failure to secure appropriate equipment, because roads were too dangerous or, more often, were not open at all. During the editing process blackouts were the norm, and Arasoughly explains that she and her editor would at times wait for 12 hours to get in just five minutes of editing between blackouts. It seems that subject and process were inextricably linked throughout this ambitious initiative. Since its release last year, This is not Living has met enormous international acclaim. In its first year it has been shown at 25 film festivals, taking the Festival Peace Prize and Jury Honourable Mention at the 9th International Women's Film Festival in Turin. Most recently, the film has been picked by New York-based distributor Women Make Movies; they have been aggressively marketing the film to universities throughout the United States. Perhaps more than most films built around conflict situations audiences around the world -- housewives, mothers, university students and businesswomen -- could connect in some manner with the stories within the film; the oft-constructed Other was far from inaccessible this time. Yet like any film that embarks upon the ambitious mission of representation, Arasoughly's film has encountered criticism. At the Ramallah premiere of the film, opened by former PLO spokeswoman Dr Hanan Ashrawi, members of the audience wondered why Arasoughly did not provide any historical context before embarking on the intimate narratives within. In New York, at the Museum of Modern Art's documentary fortnight last December, Arasoughly's voice was drowned out by a group of hecklers in the back of the audience, purportedly anti- Arab. They were eventually subdued by a MOMA curator who stated that the museum never silences artists. Arasoughly, whose background is in film and media studies, has been making videos since the early 1990s. Though she notes that she is not a prolific filmmaker, her Torn Living, an intensely subjective exploration of the experience of a Diaspora, has become a cult classic. Her most recent film, A Testimony of Birth, was produced for the UNFPA and chronicles births at checkpoints throughout Palestine. Much of Arasoughly's PhD dissertation research -- on the inscription of national history on women's bodies in Egyptian cinema -- was carried out in Egypt and she spent nearly two years in Cairo as a Fulbright scholar. At the moment she is working on a text on Arab cinema and postcolonial identities for SUNY Press, and continues to work for MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, on women and media projects throughout Palestine. Currently, she supervises the production of local television programmes on matters that affect women. Today, Arasoughly speaks with profound sadness about events in her country. While her own work may serve as a testament to the strength and ingenuity of its people in the face of draconian measures, the final scene of This is not Living leaves one with a jarring ambivalence. Scenes of snow in the final minutes, shot as a naïve home video, recall earlier scenes of bombs falling through the sky over Beit Jala. The film teaches its audience to distrust the air. Things that kill you travel through the air. The final scene seems to refer back to a time when things in the air did not always maim or kill, a time when things were simpler.
