LENS ONTO AN INTRACTABLE CONFLICT
Acclaimed Palestinian film FiveBrokenCameras is showing tomorrow at Doc Club Theater. Life spoke to its Israeli co-director
In 2005, inhabitants of Bil’in, a West Bank Palestinian village, discovered that the “separation fence” Israel was building would encroach on their agricultural land. Quickly, the village became the heart of a non-violent resistance movement, where Palestinian and international activists gathered and devised creative ways to fight the Israeli occupation.
The documentary film Five Broken Cameras is the first-hand account of the villagers’ life, in which Emad Burnat spent years filming their daily activities, often at the risk of his own life.
What started off as a way of documenting the resistance movement became a deeply personal movie, when co-director Guy Davidi, an Israeli activist and filmmaker, encouraged Burnat to film consequences of the political events on the community.
Burnat turned the camera on his own family, his youngest son Gibreel, born around the time when the fence was conceived.
The film, which was nominated at the Oscars in 2013, will be shown in Bangkok on Saturday at the Doc Club Theater on Charoen Krung 30.
Ahead of the screening, Life talked to Guy Davidi about injecting intimate scenes into the political documentary, creating a complex narrative and empowering individual voices. How did the collaboration between Emad Burnat and you come about?
Around the time when the protests started, Emad received his first camera and began documenting the movement against the separation fence. And I was in Bil’in as an Israeli sympathiser right from the start. At the time, I was already making video reports for an alternative media collective and thus often participated in demonstrations in the West Bank.
In 2005, I also made my first feature film in Bil’in, Interrupted Streams, which is about Israeli control over water. I had to stay in the village for weeks, which wasn’t something easy for Palestinians to accept. They were afraid that they would be accused of normalising their relationship with Israelis — and in fact, it’s an accusation that Emad and the people of Bil’in experienced when we made Five Broken Cameras.
For years, Emad didn’t think of doing a film, but I think that after many filmmakers passed in Bil’in and used his footage, this urge came to him. In 2009, he approached me directly to make a movie together.
Since the footage was shot by Emad, how did it feel for you to co-direct a film without being present at the scene the whole time? I had almost no part in the filming process. Around 85% of the footage was Emad’s. The rest came from other cameramen including myself. For Emad, the amount of footage (more than 700 tapes) were his life, and everything was mixed altogether. So I took on the role of a storyteller.
It was also a challenge for me to give up on my space for Emad. Although the footage already existed and I was the one creating the film, I had to be ready to put Emad’s work at the centre — knowing that my own wouldn’t be entirely revealed.
How did you create such a compelling personal narrative based simply on footage of protests?
When I first looked into Emad’s existing footage, I wasn’t sure I wanted to make another film on the same subject of resistance. (At this point, two other documentary films had already been made about Bil’in). So I had to convince Emad to make it a personal film, but didn’t know whether his footage permitted that.
That is until I found a tape of an old man climbing on the back of a military jeep, trying to block it from moving. Emad explained that the man was his father and that he tried to keep the jeep from taking his brother to jail. In that moment, I thought about how Emad must have felt, when he took that decision to film and not do anything else. That’s how I had the idea of a film which would focus on Emad as a cameraman.
You wrote the voice-over text, which is so essential to the narration. How comfortable were you putting words to Emad Burnat’s experience?
I think it was quite easy for me to write the text, because I had spent so much time in Bil’in. I developed an intuition about how Emad experienced things. I also found inspiration in Emad’s footage and my own experiences, as well as in other people I met in Bil’in. After the text was translated into Arabic, Emad looked over it and made some changes to fit it to his language and tone.
FiveBrokenCameras is showing tomorrow at 5.30pm at Doc Club Theater, Warehouse 30, Charoen Krung 30. Ticket costs 100 baht. Contact docclub.register@gmail.com. A panel discussion on “Fiction Documentary” will follow the screening.
They were afraid that they would be accused of normalising their relationship with Israelis