Longing and belonging

A new documentary addresses the question of dispossession straight from the heart. Mohamed El-Assyouti meets its maker
Laughing often, crying sometimes: Palestinian children on both sides of the border somehow learn to live and dream, as refugees or under occupation
photo: Randa Shaath
Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri, whose award-winning documentaries on Palestine are screened on TV channels and at university campuses world- wide, directed Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (aka Ahlam Al-Manfa, Exile Dreams) this year. The 56-minute documentary was celebrated at the Fifth Ismailia Festival for Documentary and Short Films (27 October - 1 November) in more ways than one. It depicts children laughing often and crying sometimes, as they play, paint, chat, dance and make friends. Third-generation Palestinian refugees discover -- and reject -- the reality of their condition. They want to be free to live, learn and fall in love, all of which are almost impossible when they have no civil rights either in Lebanon or in Israel. On either side of the barbed wire, these children, mostly orphans, live exiled in refugee concentration camps, with poor educational systems and virtually no basic services. Since 1948, their families have been exiled from their native towns and villages, many of which have been physically eliminated by the Israeli occupation.
Nevertheless, Israelis are barely referred to in the film and, contrary to more common sensationalist representations, never alluded to as the "enemy." The film includes only split-second images of funerals, soldiers firing at stone- throwers, and wounded Palestinians. Masri looks at the condition of a population being occupied and displaced from the inside; she foregrounds the universally alarming question of homelessness and dispossession through a humanist rather than a nationalist rhetoric. The immediate status quo -- teenagers separated from friends and relatives with whom they can correspond only through letters and e-mail -- shapes Frontiers's structure.
As Masri shot Frontiers, major historical events were occurring on the ground. She did not intend to film Lebanese- Israeli border clashes, but the evacuation of south Lebanon and the Intifada's eruption influenced her characters' lives, and so could not be overlooked in the film. The retreat allowed refugees on both sides of the borders a chance to see, touch and even kiss their dear ones through the barbed wires for the first time since 1948. Thus, the two main characters, 14-year-old Manar of Dheisha Camp and 13-year-old Mona of Shatila Camp, whose correspondence had been epistolary throughout the film, meet face to face for the first time in a climatic scene. Around them, relatives torn apart or who had never seen each other held hands, kissed and exchanged reminiscences through the wire. Frontiers follows the course of their friendship's development. For third-generation Shatila refugees, being at the barbed wire after the evacuation of south Lebanon meant seeing Palestinian land for the first time.
Manar, from Dheisha Camp, spends a lot of her time at Ibda' Culture Centre where she dances the Palestinian dabka. Very outspoken and charismatic, she was chosen by Al-Awda (Return), a Palestinian/Arab American group advocating the refugees' right of return, to give a speech at a "Right of Return" rally in Washington DC. The group filmed her speech on mini-DV and sent it to Masri, who used an excerpt from it in the finale of Frontiers. "Manar's words in Frontiers sound like they were scripted," Masri comments, but they were not; she even had to tone the young girl down when filming, because she is naturally very expressive.
The importance of belonging to a homeland is not stressed didactically from the documentary's initial premise but is discovered as the friendship develops. Their feelings of longing for each other cause the characters, along with the viewer, to discover the importance of belonging. They are uprooted decades before their birth and expected to wither and die, but they intuitively realise that their roots go back centuries and that they cannot but reach for them. The question the film addresses is not who is guilty and who is right, but what is going to be the fate of young girls who yearn to live somewhere, free to love and dream. Masri is likely to return a few years from now to see what has become of her subjects -- something like Michael Apted's 28 UP (1984), which documents 20 years in the life of its protagonists.
The lyricism of Masri's style is reminiscent of Humphrey Jennings's World War II- aftermath films, especially Diary for Timothy (1945) whose voice-over commentary Graham Greene penned. But Masri had never seen any of Jennings's films, and although she likes the British documentary style in general -- some of her independently directed films were commissioned by BBC and Channel Four -- she feels closer to Iranian than to British cinema. "The director needs to be familiar with the subject, and her eye determines the approach that can derive inspirational moments as well as illuminate satirical, ironic and lyrical layers," she contends.
She prefers intuition, operating on gut feeling, to intellectual exercises; that is why she, her husband and partner, director Jean Chamoun, and her small crew build very intimate relationships with her subjects -- almost living with them -- for months before bringing in their equipment. "We create this bond of trust. If they feel secure they'll be natural in front of the camera, which they need to feel is on their side," Masri believes. She argues that the support of the community on which a documentary focuses is essential, because otherwise subjects fear the prying voyeurism of the camera and the possibility that the material may be used in an exploitative manner. Her last two documentaries were set in refugee camps, especially Shatila, where most children are orphans and live together "as one big family," so when they are filmed as a group they are spontaneous and neither camera-shy nor self-conscious.
Masri has a very comforting, relaxing and even charming character. From the very first encounter one feels one has known her forever. Doubtless, this facilitated her task by enabling her to establish firm friendships with the subjects of her documentaries before deciding to make a film about them. Masri continues: "We were able to build a relationship very quickly; they're very open, friendly and enthusiastic and, since most of them are girls, they felt comfortable with me. Gradually, the girls could express their feelings regardless of the camera's presence, so Frontiers's mood is created by the characters themselves." Dramatic scenes -- sudden mood swings lead to collective weeping, for instance -- were handled in an observational cinéma vérité style.
Frontiers is a continuation of a project that began two years ago with Children of Shatila. In the earlier film, she sought not to make a conventional documentary but to look at reality indirectly, through the dreams and fantasies of the young female teenagers -- investigating their role as means of survival and identity affirmation. Memory plays a pivotal role in the life of refugees, she discovered. In Children, Masri gives Eissa, an amnesiac 12-year-old, a DV camera, which he looks at the wrong way round, then learns to use as means of reconstructing memory and discovering identity. She confesses that "through his eyes, I saw things differently." This pluralistic, equivocal use of the medium is again at play in some of the latter scenes of Frontiers, where the teenagers use a mini-DV camera during their encounters.
"I'm glad the two films are different, even though their setting is the same," says Masri. Different stages of childhood and historical circumstances clearly give each film its unique mood. "Making a film that is human and artistic to be understood by people worldwide without interfering via voice-over commentary is very difficult," she argues. "Therefore, I had to add some basic background information through titles, for instance, to clarify any confusion about the whereabouts of the two camps, the borders and the few side interviews. Explaining a little was necessary because TV stations in diverse cultures broadcast the films -- sometimes 100 different channels buy one film. Unfortunately, even Arabs know very little about the details of the situation, so sometimes repetition is inevitable, which is dangerous if one fails to find a new language and style for each film."
Last month, Frontiers won a Special Jury Award at the Beirut Film Festival, and the Earth Vision Award, to which another nine films were nominated, at a Tokyo-based environmental film festival, before winning the Ismailia Festival's Best Documentary Award. It was also voted best documentary by the Egyptian Critics' and Egyptian Documentary Filmmakers' Associations at the same festival.
Masri's films are screened on numerous TV channels world-wide, sometimes subtitled, and at other times dubbed. Extra commentaries might be added. They are also shown on university campuses all over the US, which the filmmaker sees as "a positive thing. Since they're not shown on commercial and public US TV, at least they reach the young intelligentsia, which is a way of getting the people who don't know much about the Middle East problem to see a different dimension of it. The people in my films and myself get messages from all over the globe, and that communication boosts our morale, because we see we have the support of so many who become inspired to do something."
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