DRIVEN BY HUMANITY
With Gaza under blockade, Paula Whetu Jones talks to Joanna Wane about her documentary on Auckland cardiac surgeon Alan Kerr’s lifesaving work with Palestinian children — and why it’s one from the heart
The first time film-maker Paula Whetu Jones came across pioneering cardiac surgeon Dr Alan Kerr was when she was shooting a Christmas special for Maori Television in 2006 on extraordinary New Zealanders. The producer on the show was one of his former patients and Kerr had performed heart surgery on her son, too.
By then, the retired head of cardiothoracic surgery at Greenlane Hospital was in his early
70s and had already made multiple missions to Gaza and the West Bank, treating Palestinian children with heart defects and training local staff, including a young female surgeon.
Last year, a new operating theatre specialising in paediatric cardiac surgery in Ramallah was named after him.
Steve Sosebee, the American founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, has described Kerr as “one of the greatest humans on the planet”, who often put his own life in danger. “Volunteering at Shifa Hospital [in Gaza] during the second intifada was crazy even by Gaza’s standards,” he wrote in a recent tribute to a man he says has saved hundreds of lives.
But when Jones, who co-wrote and codirected last year’s moving feature film Whina, submitted multiple funding applications to make a documentary on Kerr and his wife Hazel, she was told nobody was interested in old people or Palestinian children.
She went ahead with it anyway, self-funding half a dozen trips to the West Bank over the past
16 years with her co-creative on the project, Tamara Azizian. When they first began filming at the Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, where Kerr’s team is now based, it was still the pre-digital era and footage was shot on videotape. On their longest visit, they stayed for nine months.
The Auckland-based Palestine Human Rights Campaign has now put out a call to friends and supporters for financial help to fund final post-production work on the documentary, The Doctor’s Wife, which it’s hoped will be completed early next year.
Both Jones and Azizian are devastated by the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, and the blockade of Gaza, where hospitals have been overwhelmed by casualties. Although their visa applications to enter Gaza for filming were turned down by the Israeli authorities on their first visit in 2007, the pair spent time with families who’d been permitted to bring their children to the West Bank for heart surgery — a lifeline closed to them now.
“The boys that Dr Alan operated on then will be young adults now and we don’t know their fate,” says Azizian, who was born in Moscow to Russian and Armenian parents and moved to New Zealand with her family in the 1990s. She was a student at Auckland’s South Seas Film School when Jones came in as a guest speaker and later worked on her 2012 documentary, Lost Boys.
On one of their trips in 2016, they were accompanied by artist Paitangi Ostick and carver/ musician Katz Maihi in a collaboration with Palestinian artists that featured in a web series,
He Ao Kotahi.
Kerr is now in his late 80s and had to cancel a planned trip to the West Bank early this year after he was in a serious accident in Auckland. His daughter went instead to receive a Medal of Honour on his behalf. Footage of her visit, filmed by Kiwi trauma nurse Warren Nairn, will feature in the documentary.
Jones says Kerr — who everyone calls “Dr Alan” — is revered and his wife Hazel is equally loved within the community for her work with children in refugee camps, running dance, drama and art classes. As the title The Doctor’s Wife suggests, she’s right at the heart of the documentary.
“Hazel is the chitty-chat one who makes everybody feel at home and comfortable. He’s the business and she’s the mum. They’re a very oldschool, beautiful couple. Amazing, humble people who do such wonderful things and nobody knows about it. They just get on with it.”
Jones, a mother of three, has been in a wheelchair since 2010 after becoming paralysed from the waist down as the result of unexplained nerve damage to her spine. A dark comedy series, Spinal Destination, she’s created based on her experience is set for release on Sky Open next year.
Because much of the West Bank isn’t wheelchair-accessible, Jones had to rely on crutches to move around. “I can walk a little but I’ve got a full leg brace because one of my legs just doesn’t work at all,” she says. “I’d be crutching along really slowly and people would just pick me and carry me for a bit so I could go faster, then place me down again. Nothing ever felt like a problem.”
Both Jones and Azizian stress that The Doctor’s Wife, which has remained completely self-funded, was never conceived as a political statement. “It’s a human story about ordinary people who are doing some amazing thing,” says Jones, who’s been chipping away at completing the documentary between working on other projects. “It’s not driven by politics. It’s not driven by religious connections, it’s not driven by anything other than humanity.”