On Occupation, Power, and Privilege: An Interview with Palestinian Filmmaker Muayad Alayan

Muayad Alayan Muayad Alayan

On Occupation, Power, and Privilege: An Interview with Palestinian Filmmaker Muayad Alayan

By : Isis Nusair

This interview was conducted following the screening of the film, The Reports of Sarah and Saleem, at the Boston Palestine Film Festival in October 2018.

Isis Nusair (IN): How did you start making movies?   

Muayad Alayan (MA): One of the most significant experiences in my life was a trip I took with my family to visit the ruins of my grandmother’s house. The house, where my mother was born, is located on a beautiful hilltop in Southern Jerusalem. It was destroyed in 1948. We took our first video camera with us and what we recorded was important for my family for years to come. We kept playing the tape over and over again. It captured an image, sound, piece of history, the land and life they once had at that house. This experience shaped my fascination with the power of the moving image. 

I grew up in Jerusalem at a time when any form of self-expression or representation of anything related to our Palestinian identity and culture was illegal. As a teenager at the beginning of the second intifada, there was a general feeling among my generation that if we documented our lives under occupation and shared it with the outside world, our reality would change for the better. I started learning about cameras, editing, and filmmaking as tools were becoming more available with advances in media technology. I made short films documenting mainly the oral history of my family, friends, and people in my village as well as what was going on in Jerusalem during the second intifada. I looked into pursuing film studies, but there were no programs in Palestine at the time. I applied to film schools abroad and ended up in San Francisco where my older brother Rami was living.

IN: What did your earlier work focus on?

MA: The ideas behind the films I made have always been inspired by incidents or issues I witnessed and experienced firsthand or ones that affected my life or the lives of people in my community. I felt a need to preserve these moments on film for future generations to see. It had to be something that shed light on our human experience and lived beyond me and my physical presence in the world.

[Adeeb Safadi and Sivane Kretchner in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

IN: The Reports on Sarah and Saleem (2018) is set in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is kind of a character in the movie.                                                                            

MA: Jerusalem is a city that is segregated by all kinds of barriers, not only by physical walls. You have the Israeli Western part of the city which is modern and privileged, and you have the Palestinian Eastern part which is impoverished and full of ghettoes. The walls in Jerusalem are physical, political, socio-economic, and juridical. Different housing policies, security practices, and educational systems shape this segregation that affects all aspects of life. You can sense that only if you live in the city and not by watching the news.

I wanted audiences to “feel something” about this place. Jerusalem is a character in the film in this sense. How does this city, in the story world, react to such social drama, and how do its systems of segregation and repression act on each individual? If you are a Palestinian Jerusalemite you will know that your life and the lives of people close to you can be jeopardized and turned upside down in a split of a second over the simplest of things. I am always inspired by stories of average human beings facing issues bigger than themselves. This provides a rich environment for examining the human condition. In Jerusalem, people face unbearable circumstances on a daily bases.

IN: The film starts with the every day, a simple love affair that cannot stand the weight of politics in a place like Jerusalem. 

MA: Everything is political in Jerusalem. An infidelity like the one portrayed in the film could happen anywhere in the world with personal and social consequences. Yet, only in Jerusalem could it have this kind of political ramification in the lives of the individuals involved and their families.

IN: The film crosses a number of boundaries especially in its focus on the relation between Sarah and Saleem. Although their relationship is supposed to be private and secret, it does not escape the surveillance and restrictions of the outside world.

MA: In Jerusalem, as in all of Palestine, there is an enormous amount of intrusion by the authorities into the private lives of individuals in the name, of course, of security and control. As a Palestinian teenager, and like the majority of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the first jobs I could find were in the Western part of the city. This was my first encounter with Israeli society beyond the regular encounters with the police and soldiers in the Eastern part. I started working in a hotel and at a café, and I witnessed then these relationships that were happening in the dark shadows of the city. The initial story development was triggered by these affairs, and by the Israeli military invasion into Palestinian Territories where a lot of data got, and every now and then continues to get, confiscated from official Palestinian institutions, security agencies, and civil society organizations.

[Adeeb Safadi in The Reports On Sarah and Saleem]

Numerous people get arrested as a result and their lives are ruined by such abuse of power due to the huge amount of data gathered about their private lives. This data is often interpreted selectively, out of context, without verification or due process. These were the starting points for the film. What if such an affair is no longer in the dark? What if information about such an affair ends up at the hands of the intelligence and military apparatus, and what will be at stake for everyone involved? How could the sequence of events, in this case, say something about the general everyday life in Jerusalem in comparison to other places in the world?

You cannot ignore what sets people apart in the first place, and the systems of power that sustain the divide and inequality between them. There is a system of haves and have nots, of privileges afforded to some but not to others, that is continuously reinforced.

IN: The film offers a certain intimacy considering the situation. The two lovers are so close, yet it is impossible for them to remain together. There is a certain fluidity between the characters and events and a certain rigidity and power imbalance between them. 

MA: I cannot stand romanticized narratives or ones that use the Romeo and Juliette structure when dealing with Palestinian-Israeli relations. You cannot ignore what sets people apart in the first place, and the systems of power that sustain the divide and inequality between them. There is a system of haves and have nots, of privileges afforded to some but not to others, that is continuously reinforced. If you come as a tourist and spend a few hours in Jerusalem you might think that there is a certain fluidity between people. But in a split of a second, the power imbalance could kick in, and only then you would encounter such inequality and segregation. People I met at work who had such affairs clearly knew that this was just a temporary affair. The power imbalance is clearly “in the room” or at the back of their minds all the time. It was still a convenient affair because they were having it with someone from “the other” side of town, so chances are people in their communities would not know about it. 

IN: The film provides a critique of different institutions like marriage, and the security-state apparatus. It also critiques particular conceptions of masculinity and heroism on the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

MA: When developing the story with my brother and script-writer, Rami Alayan, we wanted to create real life and believable characters that are not flat representations of “good” or “bad.” It is the systems they choose to represent or defy, and the values they decide to live by or contradict that are at question here. The questioning and critique of these systems and conceptions is sub-textually presented through the actions of the characters and the consequences they are faced with throughout the film.

IN: What is the significance of the particular representation of Bisan, Saleem's wife, in the movie and the strength of character, will, and grace with which she handles the situation?

[Maisa Abd Elhadi in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

MA: Bisan’s character undergoes major change. She starts out innocent and living in the protected environment of her family. As the film progresses, she is forced to go through a journey of confronting betrayal, grief, and the challenges that bring out her true strength. Most importantly, Bisan does not surrender to simply doing what is expected of her by her family and society. She handles the situation with the grace of the caring mother she becomes by the end of the film. 

[Maisa Abd Elhadi and Sivane Kretchner in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

IN: The film deals with women's agency and their alliance at the end to offer alternatives. Is your film trying to challenge the status quo and offer a different reality as part of creating alternative solutions?

MA: By the end of the film, the two women lead characters are the ones who make choices that they believe, according to their conscience, are right and just for themselves and those around them. They do not choose an easy way out that their privilege could offer them on the social, political, and juridical levels. There is often extra pressure on women to conform to the status quo, albeit differently, in both Palestinian and Israeli societies. Both Bisan and Sarah do not do what is expected of them, and they give up something in order to do what they consider is right. Bisan gains her independence but has to let go of her dependence on her family and with it her brother’s interference in the decisions that should be her own. In the case of Sarah, we wanted her to represent a specific type of Israeli who wants to be liberal, progressive, and do the right thing as long as it does not affect their comfort zone and privilege. The statement at the end is telling. Unless you are willing to get out of your comfort zone and compromise on your privileges, you will not be able to redeem yourself and will end up losing your soul and humanity.
                                                                                                                                                         
IN: Your earlier film, Love, Theft and Other Entanglements (2015), was filmed in long shots and in black and white. The title of the film alludes to the national struggle post-Oslo and to the theft of land, opportunity, and dignity.     

[Maya Abu Alhayyat in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

MA: I wanted the film to feel like a fairy-tale set in Palestine. I wanted it to move away from the visuals and images people are usually exposed to from the media. Filming in black and white also helped in the absurd/dark humor that was intended for the story, and that is also a real Palestinian survival mechanism amidst all the miseries we continue to face. A minimalist, less is more approach was the general guideline we applied throughout the process of writing the script and in the cinematography. We focused on the characters and eliminated unnecessary elements. The story world could be set anywhere and at any moment in time, the only time frame is the post-Oslo reality.

IN: The film critiques the peace process as well as the nationalist discourse of heroism. Mousa, the hero, reminded me of Emile Habibi's Saeed in the Pessoptimist

 

[Sami Metwasi in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

MA: The characters are facing real-life situations but ones that are so absurd that one wonders whether what is happening is real or fiction, which is true to the unfortunate times we are experiencing at the collective level. I consider myself part of the post-Oslo depressed generation, which Mousa, the main character in Love, Theft and other Entanglements is also part of. Growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a sense of hope that what was coming will be better. Unfortunately, the new reality turned out to be worse. We were not only faced with the ongoing occupation, but with political corruption, neoliberalism, foreign aid and development agendas, and the consequences of it all, as well as the old social taboos and dilemmas. All of these were elements standing in Mousa’s way, yet he eventually finds a way to move on, and redeem himself but not in a very happy ending kind of scenario. In Emile Habibi’s brilliant Pessomtimist, the main character also belongs to a generation of Palestinians that were faced with disappointment and defeat at different levels, yet they somehow found the means to persist and survive.

[Riyad Sliman in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

IN: There has been a major debate recently about funding sources for Palestinian cinema. Where did you get the funding to make this film?

MA: The film was made possible through funding from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), The Hubert Bals Fund (International Film Festival Rotterdam), The World Cinema Fund (Berlinale), FilmLab: Palestine, as well as several other Palestinian institutions. We also partnered with a Mexican production company that provided us with a high-end camera and cinematography equipment that are not available in Palestine, making The Reports of Sarah and Saleem the first Palestinian/Mexican co-production. I am aware of the challenges you are referring to regarding funding in Palestine and the Arab world more generally. This, unfortunately, continues to be a problem. For me, none of my films would have been possible without the generous support and contribution of friends, colleagues, and family members as well as the in-kind support of businesses such as hotels and restaurants within my community in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It takes a village to make a film!

IN: Are you part of a younger generation of filmmakers who are shaping Palestinian cinema? Is there in your view a distinctive Palestinian cinema?  

MA: I think the next generation will be in a better position to judge how our generation is contributing to the making of Palestinian cinema. I think the first generation of filmmakers succeeded in getting Palestinian cinema out to the world, and confronted many challenges and efforts that were and continue to be invested in suppressing any voice or narrative from Palestine, or any kind of recognition for Palestinian art and culture. We are still living under occupation, but I believe that we are much more than just a nation under occupation. We have a lot to share with the world about the full spectrum of the human experience. There have been several works in the past few years that are moving in that direction in their storyline and form compared to what has been produced earlier.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Dystopian and Alternate Realities: An Interview with Lyd filmmakers, Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis

      Dystopian and Alternate Realities: An Interview with Lyd filmmakers, Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis

      As an American Jew, we are literally taught an alternate reality, taught an alternate history. The Zionist project of creating the state of Israel is a world building project. The reality we live in is like science fiction, and that surrealness was one of the biggest inspirations for the science fiction elements of the film. To build a nation, you need to create a mythology. The mythology of the state of Israel that we all are taught and kind of brainwashed with is what sustains the occupation. It is so deep. We already talked about changing names on streets and calling Lyd Lod.

    • Obscurity and a Drop of Hope: Interview with Syrian Filmmaker, Soudade Kaadan

      Obscurity and a Drop of Hope: Interview with Syrian Filmmaker, Soudade Kaadan

      This interview was conducted with Syrian filmmaker Soudade Kaadan following the release of her recent films, Aziza (2019), The Day I Lost My Shadow (2018), and Obscure (2017). The Day I Lost my Shadow won in 2018 the Lion of the Future - “Luigi De Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film.

    • عتمة وبعض من الأمل: مقابلة مع المخرجة السورية سؤدد كعدان

      عتمة وبعض من الأمل: مقابلة مع المخرجة السورية سؤدد كعدان

      أجري هذا اللقاء عقب عرض أفلام المخرجة السورية سؤدد كعدان التي تضمنت «عزيزة» (٢٠١٩)، «يوم أضعت ظلي» (٢٠١٨) و«عتمة» (٢٠١٧). حصل فيلم «يوم أضعت ظلي» على جائزة «أسد المستقبل» لأول عمل روائي في مهرجان فينيسيا للأفلام.

Refusing the Separation: An Interview with Palestinian Filmmaker Annemarie Jacir

This interview was conducted with Annemarie Jacir following the release of her recent film Wajib (2017).

Isis Nusair (IN): How did you start making movies?

Annemarie Jacir (AMJ): When I graduated from university, I moved to Los Angeles and rented a room with a friend and began to work as a production assistant and doing whatever jobs I managed to find. I was interested in cinema but did not know yet what I wanted to do or what I could do. I also learned how to edit from a friend and began playing with images and shooting my own experimental films.   

IN: Your film Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) deals with the Israeli occupation. What presence does the Israeli occupation have in your films, and how does it shape the relation to Palestine?

AMJ: Like Twenty Impossibles is about many things, including the responsibility one has as an artist and different positions of power. The idea for the film was also about our reality as Palestinians as a people under occupation and specifically how the Oslo years were, for most of us, another political mechanism to keep us separated from each other as Palestinians. One theme in almost all my films is refusing this separation. 

IN: All of your films have focused on Palestine while examining different periods, communities, and locations. Why is it important for you to do so?

AMJ: It is what it is. I focus on what I know, what I want to know more about, and on what moves me. 

IN: In When I Saw You (2012) you focus on Palestinian refugees and resistance (the emergence of the Fidayeen movement). What connection do you see between the two, and how does that relation unfold in the movie? 

AMJ: They are absolutely interlinked. When I Saw You takes place during a very important moment in our history. Young people decided to join together to resist together. They also decided that even though they had been victimized, they were not going to be victims anymore. They refused to be victims. These young women and men formed the resistance. What they wanted was in fact very simple—to be able to go back to their homes, and to live as free human beings. When writing the story, the character of Tarek was another way to visualize this feeling in parallel. When I Saw You is a coming of age story not only of a boy but also of his mother, and of a people. 

Jacir working on a scene from When I Saw You

Ruba Blal and Annemarie Jacir working on a scene from When I Saw You

Mahmoud Asfa in When I Saw You

IN: In both Salt of This Sea (2007) and Wajib (2017) you examine different relations to Palestine where people are either leaving or coming back. What connection are you trying to make between Palestinians in the diaspora and those in the 1948 and 1967 areas? 

AMJ: Palestinians are one. Each individual has their own experience, their own story. I do not believe there is a difference between those in 1948 and those in 1967, between refugees and those here in Palestine, many of whom are refugees as well. 

Suheir Hammad, Saleh Bakri, and Annemarie Jacir at Cannes Film Festival

IN: You yourself have lived throughout the years in between these different spaces. How does this shape your relation to Palestine and the making of your films?

AMJ: Palestine has been the only constant in my life. I have spent my life between many cities, living in different places, and most are places I never returned to again. People and faces I never saw again. Palestine is the only place I have known my entire life, and my relationship with it has shaped me as a person, and as a filmmaker.

IN: Soraya (Suheir Hammad) in Salt of This Sea (2007) came from Brooklyn to Palestine. Why did she come back and what was she trying to achieve?

AMJ: She comes back to the place she comes from. She acts on the dream of every Palestinian refugee—to be able to return to the place we were displaced from. Because she has an American passport, she is able to do that—unlike her grandparents and her parents who never were able to return. A document allows her to, so she comes back. A third-generation refugee, a people who still to this day are not allowed to return. Salt of this Sea is like a fantasy. What if we could return? What would we do? What if we could go into our former homes, now occupied? What if we could walk right into the very bank that froze our family assets? What if we could spend the night in the villages that were demolished, in whatever remaining house we found?

IN: Wajib is like a road movie that moves quickly in one day in Nazareth between different characters and segments of society. Why was it important for you to use this style?

Palestinians are one. Each individual has their own experience, their own story. I do not believe there is a difference between those in 1948 and those in 1967, between refugees and those here in Palestine, many of whom are refugees as well.

AMJ: For me, it was a way to frame the story to allow me to explore the father and son relationship and also life in Nazareth, how a community interacts, and how its members perform in front of each other and in private. Everyone has their notion of wajib, of tradition. The delivering of wedding invitations in Palestine, occupied seventy years ago and where the majority of its inhabitants became refugees, is important. You have a town like Nazareth, the largest Palestinian town in historic Palestine, where the remaining residents were forced to carry Israeli IDs—and they hold on so strongly to this tradition of hand delivering wedding invitations no matter what. I believe it is about holding onto one’s identity and all the contradictions that come with it. 

I loved the idea of putting two people in a car where they are forced to confront each other, forced to speak to each other without escape, almost like a prison. Yes, there is history in everything. The old Volvo, full of memories, which was their car when they were a family, is the only thing Abu Shadi has left of it.

The car allowed me to tell the story of the two characters as they are when they are alone together in the vehicle, and as they move from house to house and “perform” something else in front of the community or when they are in public.

I also liked the challenge of structuring the film to take place in one day. Wajib is my most dialogue-heavy film—the structure and the story is all built on dialogue. However, what I am most interested in are the things they do not say to each other and have never said to each other.

IN: Why was it important to focus on this particular family in the movie?

AMJ: The film is about Palestinians in Nazareth and the characters are both Christian and Muslim. Like Nazareth of course, a city which is seventy percent Muslim and thirty percent Christian, a mixed city. Shadi and Abu Shadi are secular people, but you see some of their family members are Christian. Shadi’s mother was Muslim. They visit several Muslim homes in the film. I wanted to paint a picture of this mixed city, not just in terms of religion but also, and much more importantly, in terms of class.

IN: Wajib contains an interesting generational dialogue between the two main characters in the film. What is the film trying to say about the relation between the past and the present, the social and the political?

AMJ: The social and the political cannot be separated. Essentially Shadi and Abu Shadi feel the same anger, but they have chosen to deal with it and express it in different ways. The film follows the story of these two men, carrying out a masculine tradition of delivering invitations. This leaves the women performing other traditions. Or not, as in the case of Shadi's mother. Women are both at the forefront and on the margins in this story, always present. Sometimes part of keeping up faces and traditions, and sometimes breaking all boundaries. Shadi's mother—who is absent—is, in fact, the most present in the film. She is in every single scene, a presence between them.

IN: The Israeli state is also present yet absent in Wajib. How are the main characters negotiating their relation to that state?

AMJ: Abu Shadi is a schoolteacher in a system that is very carefully monitored, and he has learned to step carefully and cautiously. The Palestinian schools inside Israel are surveilled very closely by the Israeli authorities and there are subjects and ideas that they are forbidden to speak about or even mention, like our history, the Nakba, what happened to us in 1948, and what is still happening right now. In fact the Israeli state has a system to hire people whose job title is literally called “the inspectors of knowledge” and who monitor and report everything happening in Arab schools to the Israeli Ministry of Education.

When I developed the character of Shadi, I imagined him a normal teenager with a rebellious side. As most teenagers, there came a point where he began to ask questions about the power imbalance and racism he saw around him. In a place where people are silenced for being critical of these kinds of policies, those questions put him in danger and his father decided to send him abroad. Shadi never wanted to leave. I imagined him as a teenager who also felt he could fight injustice and make a change. Someone with rage and also with great hope. He was not involved in political parties but rather he was growing into an awareness and political consciousness, which thus connected him with the rest of the world. This made him a threat to the Israeli state and Abu Shadi, a man who lived through the martial law of 1949-1966 when Israel placed all Palestinian citizens living inside what had become the state of Israel under harsh repression. This is very important to know about him and why his character is the way it is, still recalls daily life during that time of curfews, administrative detentions, and expulsions for Palestinians living inside. He learned that, in order to survive, he had to be compliant, subservient.

Mohammed Bakri and Saleh Bakri in Wajib

IN: The city of Nazareth also plays a role in the film.                                                       

AMJ: The city of Nazareth itself is a character: a city occupied seventy years ago. Today people are living on top of each other, and there is a lot of frustration. The people of Nazareth do not have full rights as citizens and deal with daily discrimination in their jobs, in work, in schools, in municipal services, in everything. I feel a lot of tension in Nazareth. For me, this aggression is something that will eventually explode, as it has in the past and it will again. Even if some people’s survival mechanism is apathy, eventually the tension will lead elsewhere. People can only function so long with a boot on their neck.

IN: Does it make a difference being a woman filmmaker? Is there a Palestinian women's cinema? 

AMJ: I do not believe in women's cinema.  

IN: In addition to making movies, you also write poetry? What themes do you depict in your poetry and how do they relate to the making of your films?

AMJ: Poetry is about capturing an image, a moment in time or a feeling. I think cinema is very similar. I like the simplicity of poetry and the challenge of being as bare bones and streamline as possible. I try to do that in my films too but cinema is the gathering of so many elements on a larger stage—light, music, human performances and flaws, an actual image which might lend to an imagined one…

IN: What are you currently engaged with in addition to your cinematic work?

AMJ: I have initiated along with my sister Emily Jacir and our family the project of a lifetime. We are currently restoring and renovating our family’s ancestral home in Bethlehem (a 127-year old house) in order to open a cultural space dedicated to the arts, research, and the exchange of ideas. We have already been working on it daily for the past couple of years and this year it has finally opened to the public. Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir is a project I care deeply about and feel that these kinds of open spaces, community spaces, are extremely important for us, especially in the southern part of Palestine. Activities so far include providing a green space for the children at the Aida refugee camp in collaboration with Rowwad Center for the Arts, and artists’ workshops and seminars. The space will host film screenings and exhibitions and be a general gathering space for artists and academics, particularly those interested in the Ottoman period before Palestine was occupied.

The cultural center established by the Jacir sisters in Bethlehem