ARAB SPRING OF CINEMA

Meenakshi Rao tells you how global film-makers, much away from the box office syndrome, are cutting in potent cinema with stunning footage from the heart of conflict zones all over the world, but how it’s a sad struggle for them to get the budgets required for garnering global eyeballs for their history-making efforts

The brilliant romantic thriller Omar nearly did not make it to India. But thanks to its producer-actor Waleed Zuaiter, a Palestinian who plays an Israeli agent in the film, this haunting feature from the conflict driven West Bank region showed up at the recent Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) on a blue ray DVD. Zuaiter had sent it over from his personal collection after the film’s sales department said it could come here only on a format not available in India.

It is a stunning movie of betrayal at all levels — personal, emotional, political and existential — identifying with the plight of the Palestinian refugees of over six decades. Brilliantly weaving fact and fiction, romance and longing, friendship and betrayal, conflict and despair — and, of course, two distinctly away genres of a romance within a thriller — this 97-minute compelling saga has been making waves in festival circuits all around the world. It has even managed a commercial release in America, doing business worth $700,000 on the ride to an Oscar nomination last year.

Omar is one among a rash of films and documentaries emanating from strife-torn areas around the world, be it the Syrian civil war, the Egyptian revolution or the Middle East conflict, giving passionate film-makers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam an inadvertent but appropriate theme for their DIFF edition in its third year.

“Cinema emanating from strife-torn areas is the newest way of recording history. It is truth, it’s above prejudice, it comes with perspective and it transcends borders to garner world public opinion on a particular cause or conflict that may otherwise be closed to the world,” Zuaiter explains in a phone conversation from Los Angeles.

Based in the US, far away from the dark and dingy Palestine camps in West Bank from where he hails, Zuaiter feels united with his extended brotherhood through a deep sense of displacement. “You see, I’ve been displaced thrice — once from Palestine, then from Kuwait and am now in the US where I am yet to feel completely American,” he says.

Palestinian film-maker Mahdi Feifil puts it even more directly when he answers a similar query on how does it really feel to be without a nation and a permanent refugee. “Luckily, I am no longer a refugee, but I still remain in exile. Exile is a complex state of being, but you learn to live with it eventually. Being a refugee, however, is a tough gig. I wouldn’t wish that for anyone,” he says.

Film-makers like Jehane Noujaim of the much talked of documentary The Square may be Harvard educated, but is connected to her motherland emotionally, just like Feifil is to Palestine and felt the need to lay bare his personal documentation of years of filming in a camp from where his family escaped first to Dubai and then to Denmark. The World Is Not Ours is the result of this extensive footage of the Ain El Hel-weh camp and a slice of life battling the blues there.

Lazing in the sylvan surroundings of the quaint Tibetan refugee hill station of McLeodganj and watching some of these explosive films and documentaries unfold at DIFF, you feel almost guilty of being so secure. Safe in the confines of a largely peaceful nation, outrage and sadness grips you in equal measure as you see those stories coming from flashpoint areas where life is just putty in the hands of violent death and freedom a desire never to be fulfilled, where hope dies young and mostly without premise.

Noujaim captured this angst and volatility movingly but was unavailable to comment on the movement of conflict cinema. Her Press department said she can talk to media only in countries where The Square, her award winning documentary on the Egyptian revolution, is being promoted. India is not one of those countries even though The Square was a sellout at DIFF.

The stunning documentary gets you up-close and inside the unfolding Arab Spring after three years of filming at Tahrir Square. It narrates the travails of a perpetually protesting population through the revolution’s four main nerve-points — a youth, an actor, an Islamist and a pop singer.

The film’s narrator Ahmed Hassan is young and witty but committed and fiery, much like the tenets of the revolution he propels. He is a passionate propagator of the ideals of the revolution even when it threatens to falls to various machinations after deposing two dictators — Mubarak after 30 years of fist rule and Mohammad Morsi after he consecrates himself as God of Islamism, not to mention the Army which comes in with some promise only to become the next tyrant.

The documentary ends with him saying cynically, “Now we are waiting to make the next one (regime to fall).” That’s pretty much the situation in a fluid Egypt today from where business has vanished as has peace and stability.

Then there is Khalid Abdalla, actor from The Kite Runner, who powers the revolution with his ideas and online campaigns which fuel the revolution when it threatens to fall to prolongation and political heist. He is the master tactician even as Jehane shows the ugly side of the uprising — stark pictures of people being run over by rampaging Army tanks and close-ups of parents who lost their sons to official bullets and gas cannon crackdowns.

And then there’s Magdy Ashour, member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the voice of liberal Islam, who joins the revolutionaries to bring down Mubarak and then falls into a difficult situation when his Muslim Brotherhood does the indefensible of conniving with the Army and eventually grabbing power by splitting the population on religious lines.

Pop singer Ramy Essam keeps the long nights at Tahrir Square alive by holding concerts and singing protest songs to give the protesters an insight into how big a job they were doing. Through these live characters empowering a revolution, the world got to see what was happening in Egypt as it never would have otherwise.

To Noujaim’s credit, she has risen over prejudice and recorded events as they happened, objectively. So The Square is a soiree of embedded emotion — there’s symbolism, hope and violence. There’s also fear, a strange oneness among people, disenchantment with the revolutionaries, the uncanny might of the population and a dose of wit too amid the rise and fall of regimes alongside the rise and fall of citizen hopes.

Hope in such films is an underlying emotion juxtaposed against sheer despair, with the latter often pervading all other situations. And it is such situations that often suck the film-maker into personal missions.

Ask Feifil what’s his connect with his refugee camp now and what’s the situation there and he starts angsting. “I returned to the camp last summer and did some follow-up recordings during the World Cup. Life in the camp has only gotten worse. With the conflict in Syria, Lebanon now has two million refugees and the camp inhabitants have almost doubled from the 70,000 in 2010 to 1.2 lakh now. Granddad is still in good form considering his age and uncle Said is also OK,” he tells you.

But along this journey, some good things have also happened. Like his documentary changing the life of his friend Abu Iyad. Iyad, originally a Hamas foot soldier in the camp, is the face of the hopelessness of the refugees, someone who runs away to Athens only to live on the streets before being deported back to the camp with nowhere to go and nothing to do. His was the most potent story in the film portraying the lost aspirations of a generation. “My film changed his life. He now lives in Berlin. When we premiered the film at The Berlinale, 2013, he was invited by the festival and decided to stay, seeking political asylum,” Feifil tells you with rare delight.

Makers of Return to Homs, Talal Derki and Orwa Nyrabia, on the other hand, are still fighting to trace their hero and cameraman even as their producer has been given asylum by Germany after Cairo threatened to hand him over to Syrian authorities.

As reputed documentarian Megan Mylan puts it, “Conflict is fodder for parallel cinema the world over, as are serious social issues. I am powered by the latter but many like Jehane go for the war thing.”

That Mylan is unconnected with anything even close to what film-makers Jehane and Derki are suffering seems to have shaped her view of choice. As Derki had remarked earlier, he had learnt his craft much before Syria slid into abject madness. So making a film on the condition of his country in the hope of getting some global help was only a matter of time.

Derki’s starkReturn To Homs captures the bloodshed in Homs where the situation is still imploding due the ongoing civil war. Derki took life-threatening risks and the emotional upheaval of filming real war as a tool to propel conflict cinema onto a much larger world template. His effort has not only won critical acclaim but also boasts of being one of the few eyes giving insight into the genocide in Syria with scant hope of a resolution of conflict.

The stark pictures of bullets tearing into people, explosions and ruthless suppression of protesters by the Army stun you into silence and shame at one level and screaming outrage at the other. It is this global reaction to Derki’s film that keeps film-makers like him on track to keep the protest going through cinema.

It is no mean achievement that this film is actually out, not when its crew has convulsed so much.

Producer Orwa Nyrabia was imprisoned for 11 days in a Syrian prison before making his way out on a heap of lies that managed to deceive the authorities and save his life. The face of the siege and hero of Homs Abdul Basset Saroot, a football legend turned rebel in Syria, is missing, as is the documentary’s cameraman Ossama al Homsi. Both are considered to be under Government arrest, whereabouts unknown, even as their brave effort is winning awards at prestigious festivals.

As for the filming of this dangerous documentary, the film-makers had to secretly smuggle in the camera in 20 pieces or so by fitting the parts into the chassis of Nyrabia’s car, just to cross the checkpoint. To reassemble the camera, they had to dismantle the entire car! And once they were identified by the authorities, the rest of the filming had to come from rebels inside Homs who shot the goings-on on spy cameras, sport cameras and mobile cameras and then somehow smuggled out the footage.

“The crisis changed each and every one of us. But mostly it was death. Death left its mark in every one of us. We all changed because of the increasing violence, the loss of people close to us, the injustice, the fragmentation. However, Abdul Basset was strong and very solid, he was and still is persistent,” Derki says.

Come to think of it, conflict cinema is nothing new. Palestine has seen it for over six decades, sometimes banned, sometimes smothered and sometimes burnt out. It survived despite being unable to can a single reel for two decades due to the violence in West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But sadly as both Zuaiter and Feifil point out, “At the end of the day, our efforts are dismissed as just another Palestinian film, dark and negative and feeding on conflict — that’s how the world views it and that’s why we don’t get a footing in major countries, or even at film festivals.”

Zuaiter echoes the troubles when he talks about the funding woes of Omar. “Producing Omar was a real challenge in terms of bringing in the money and logistics. It was a totally privately funded independent film. We got some support from the Palestinian business community. However, one firm which was to pitch in a quarter of the budget pulled out at the last minute, so it was not very easy. Of course, there were no challenges from the Israeli Government and logistics of filming in the area which was great, considering that the last time Hany was there for Paradise Now, he had a nightmarish time with the authorities,” he recalls.

The truth, howsoever excruciating, is like conflict itself. As a longtime documentary maker who has travelled the festival circuit from Amazon to the Arctic, Sarin empathises with this stark reality: “Documentary film-makers all over the world still need audiences. Festivals are valuable but going beyond them is important too. Distributors don’t pick them up, there are no platforms to show them and not enough budgets to market such films. Audiences are interested but they need to be nurtured. But who is going to nurture them? Who will be giving the money? Beyond the passion of a few people, where is the Government, where are the corporates?” she asks.

Some questions only beget more questions and haplessness — much like the underlying thread that conflict cinema propels when its camera pans over a military tank mowing down people in one part of the world or besieged citizens being felled like wild animals in another town in another country — or for that matter, a generation of refugees growing old from being 16 to turning 85, in the hope of returning to their homeland when, actually, there is no such prospect showing up even in the far horizon. Source: Sunday Pioneer, Agenda,