World demands - Palestine Solidarity Campaign

28 palestine NEWS ARTS & REVIEWSSpring 2012projects supposedly promoting mutualunderstanding. I worked with Israeli actorswho initially sounded very moderate andliberal; but later I was shocked by theirreversion to extreme, even hostile attitudes.”Iman added: “Most of these projects areabout giving Israel a better image. Eventhose Israelis who quite genuinely wantto work with us, it would be better if theyworked with their own communities, to getthem to understand their government’spolicies. We understand them all too well!”What about the protests in the UK,demanding the Globe withdraw its invitationto the Israeli company, Habima? Sami said:“What matters is that these issues havebeen raised and brought to the attentionof the British public. If Habima hadn’t beeninvited, that would not have happened.Whether they perform or not is lessimportant.”Hilary WiseNot to be outdone, the LondonbasedAlzaytouna groupare currently rehearsing anadaptation of Shakespeare’sHenry V — with dabke. Whocould miss that! Keep an eye onwww.alzaytouna.org.The 2012 Palestine Film Festivalpresented an extraordinary range of works,from a century-old piece of documentaryfootage to feature-length contemporary drama.Here are just a few of the highlights.Honey Thaljieh.Pride of place at the opening night at London’s Barbican wentto Sameh Zoabi’s award-winning Man Without a Cell Phone, across-cultural, cross-generational dramatic comedy focusingon Jawdat, a young Palestinian Israeli who is a bit of a dropout.He can’t pass his Hebrew exams to get into university and he’sonly got dead-end jobs in view. He and his mates spend much oftheir time checking out girls on their mobile phones. They hopelearning a bit of Russian will help their chances of scoring (“Russiangirls aren’t afraid of Arabs – they teach you things” – “Oh yeah? Waittill they join the army!”)Problems arise when Jawdat’s conservative father starts tobelieve that his village is being poisoned and the olive harvestthreatened by the local mobile phone transmitter and gets up apetition to have it removed. The very real issues of inequality aresomehow subsumed under this ill-fated campaign, into whichJawdat is unwillingly drawn. To complicate matters, the Israeliauthorities get suspicious when Jawdat starts fishing for girlfriendsacross the green line in the West Bank. A gentle, humorous film witha serious subtext.The power of dreamsPassion permeates three short films about Palestinian athletesstriving to make their mark. Sawsan Qaoud’s Women in theStadium looks at the burgeoning world of women’s soccer inPalestine, with four pioneering players telling their personalstories. Nothing can stop these girls – not the lack of facilities, northe hours of waiting at checkpoints, nor the problems of findingtime for their studies and family obligations. They have won overfamilies to whom the idea of girls playing football – in shorts! – was,at first, shocking. But from small beginnings a national team hasemerged: Honey Thaljieh, the team’s first captain, goes out to smalltowns and villages in the West Bank to inspire and nurture newtalent and persuade parents to let their daughters play. She hasalso become something of an ambassador for Palestinian womenin sport: you can see an interview with her at the Bristol film festivalon http://vimeo.com/34560242. There she talks about the problemsof creating a truly national team, why she would not play against anIsraeli team, how she dreams of one day becoming Minister of Sport– and how she got Cristiano Rinaldo to wear a keffiyeh.Free Running in Gaza is full of painful irony; two young men,Mohammed and Abdullah, have trained fanatically for six years inthe sport of ‘parkour’ which requires a supreme level of physicalfitness and courage. We see them sprinting down the narrowalleys of the refugee camps of Khan Younis, somersaulting acrossrooftops, scaling three storey-high ruined buildings and backflippingecstatically down sand dunes and into the sea. This is theentire focus of their lives, both an obsession and an escape. In theevening they often go and watch the sun setting over Egypt andwonder what life is like out there, where people really can run free.Mohammed says: “This sport has given me the strength to facethe pressures of the occupation. Parkour has its own philosophy;it challenges the imagination.” They long to be able to share theirtalent with the world and part of their dream has been realised,thanks to Aljazeera, who have posted the film on youtube:http://tinyurl.com/3trmg5b.Inshallah Beijing is equally poignant: four athletes – twoswimmers and two runners – were chosen to represent Palestine inthe 2008 Olympics. Their training facilities were almost non-existent: