Clandestine initiations

The premiere of Miguel Littin's A Palestinian Chronicle was one of the highlights of the Fifth Ismailia Festival for Documentaries and Short Films. The celebrated Chilean filmmaker spoke to Mohamed El-Assyouti
A Palestinian Chronicle is Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin's first film dealing with Palestine. Currently, though, he is engaged on a second film, L'Ultima Luna, a feature scripted by the director, which will focus on the experiences of expatriate Palestinians in Chile.
It was after completing the script of L'Ultima Luna that Littin felt the need to compare the script with the reality inside Palestine, a chance afforded when in May last year he went to Palestine with a small crew to shoot the documentary A Palestinian. Once there, he discovered that his script was consistent with the reality experienced by the Palestinians: "their vulnerability touched me profoundly," he comments.
Even though Littin is of Palestinian origin he had never before returned to his grandparents' home, Beit Sahhur. He knew about the place, though, from the stories told by his grandmother. And it was she, he says, who initiated him, indirectly, into Palestinian culture.
L'Ultima Luna tells of two Palestinian families, one of which emigrates to Chile. The script depicts the period from 1914-48, though the filmmaker has started to contemplate two other projects. If completed, the trilogy will cover almost nine decades, with the second film focusing on the period between 1948 and the first Intifada, the third between 1948 until the present.
Like the majority of Palestinian expatriates in Latin America, Lattin comes from an Orthodox Christian background, and admits that until very recently he was ignorant of many dimensions to the Palestinian question. But attendance at the Ismailia festival, one of the highlights of which have been films about Palestine, together with making the documentary A Palestinian Chronicle helped, he says, in broadening his understanding of the situation.
Certainly Littin is no stranger to the state of exile suffered by millions of Palestinians: after the military junta took power in Chile in 1975 he, along with 5,000 Chileans, was banned from entering his country. After 12 years of living as a political refugee in Mexico and Spain -- a period during which he familiarised himself with the Central American Maya civilisation, and the influences of Spanish, Portuguese and Arab cultures on Latin America -- he began work on the documentary Acta General de Chile (Final Statement on Chile, 1985). "I have had to put aside the person I have always been and to impersonate another, very different one, who would not arouse the suspicions of the police which forced me to emigrate from my country and leave my friends," says the first-person narrator in Gabriel Gàrc�a Marquez's biographical novel about Littin: Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin. Among those friends he did leave behind was Allende, whom he held in great esteem, though not always agreeing with his policies.
Littin's abomination of the Pinochet dictatorship finds its most eloquent expression in Acta. This celebrated four-hour-documentary was shot in secret by three crews -- one Italian, and led by a journalist researching the work of expatriate Italians in Chile, one French, and filming geographical aspects of the country, the third Dutch, and concentrating on the aftermath of an earthquake -- who never encountered each other or knew the reality of their mission.
For three months, while work on the film was in progress, Littin sneaked in and out of Chile disguised, speaking different accents and using false passports, to direct his crews. The result was a unique audio-visual indictment of Pinochet's regime.
During this period of exile, clandestine screenings of Littin's films did take place in Chile, though the authorities were avid in their attempts to destroy any negatives they could lay their hands on -- in the case of Tierra Ajena (Land Not Ours) they succeeded in destroying them all -- and burned all 12,000 copies of Marquez's Clandestine as soon as they were unloaded from the port.
As one of Marquez's closest friends Littin has the luxury of reading parts of his work-in- progress before any one else, and in case of Clandestine of insisting on changes and omissions, in order, mainly, to protect the anonymity of his accomplices. "When he showed me the manuscript." Littin reveals, "I was scared for the very first time. His narrative was as raw and spontaneous as our conversations had been."
They both share similar views on the artist's relationship with the political establishment. Littin makes independent films, away from governmental bureaucracy, and insists on complete freedom. And it is by virtue of this independence that his films have been able to influence the political arena, providing political movements in Latin America with arguments and proofs, as well as a historical and cultural depth on which they can draw. "Aesthetics restores the spiritual aspect of politics," Littin insists.
Political conflicts, even with democratic regimes, have been part and parcel of the filmmaker's life. Yet he has remained unswerving in the belief that one of the functions of art is the affirmation of individual identity: while expressing the shared nature of all human values one has to never loose sight of the individual, thus affirming the need for tolerance between different groups and views. "Humanity comprises many visions that need to be protected. Cinema, as a new art, must express the diversity of the human spirit," he believes.
Littin repeatedly emphasises the necessity to reject all monolithic world views.
"Palestine's problems are familiar to the public everywhere, because of North American and Western TV and media, all of which give the same image of the Arab/Muslim: a terrorist and an enemy of Western Culture. That's why we should try to see the diversified reality of Arab culture, away from the caricature. Unfortunately, the fight is not even."
While making A Palestinian Chronicle there were many difficulties. "Between each step and the next there was a barrier and a soldier, and every commute required enormous effort. In a land occupied by a military power the soldiers are fascists when it comes to people carrying cameras. We once found ourselves caught between children throwing stones on one side and an army with tanks and heavy artillery on the other. I didn't plan on filming a confrontation on such a scale. I was scared that one of my crew members might get shot or wounded. Thankfully the cameraman was only slightly wounded on this day."
For L'Ultima Luna Littin will be returning to Palestine with a small crew and two actors. "I could film the Palestinian episodes in Chile, or I could have written a script wholly set in Chile, but the defence of life that takes place in Palestine every day deserves to be filmed, and I need to express my views about the struggle taking place there now. One of cinema's functions is to defend life, which takes on a special importance when it comes to the problem of Palestine."
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