"Liwan: a Story of Cultural Resistance": my first documentary
In 2018, I was living and working in Sevilla, Spain, where I had got to know Doris Hakim, a Greek-Palestinian artist. I had been interested in the Israel-Palestine issue for many years, having read widely on the subject, and having been married to Israeli artist Rinat Izhak for a number of years, during which period I visited the area many times. Doris was born in Nazareth, to a Palestinian father and a Greek mother, and much of her art deals with issues of identity stemming from her upbringing.
Doris and I initially collaborated on a proposal for an art installation related to the city of Lydda - originally an Arab city in Palestine, now an Israeli city rebaptised with its biblical name of Lod. Although our proposal wasn't successful, while working on it, Doris told me the story of a 'culture café' in Nazareth called Liwan. Nazareth is a city of special significance in Israel-Palestine, in that it has an almost exclusively Arab-Palestinian population, but is located inside the state of Israel. Nazareth has a beautiful old historic market area. A supposed redevelopment programme in the run up to the year 2000 closed it for a number of years, driving away stall holders and customers, and turning it into a no-go area. In 2016 three people got together to open Liwan Culture Café: Sami Jabali, Silke Wanner & Sally Azzam. People thought they were crazy: who would visit a café in such a run-down area? But they persisted, in spite of attacks on the café, and against all odds, and stayed open. In their wake, many other places have opened in the old market area, driving a revival. Many of the owners of the new shops are women, adding to the achievement. Liwan promotes and supports Palestinian culture, by selling Palestinian arts and crafts, serving Palestinian food and drink, and holding film showings, book readings, and concerts. They practise 'cultural resistance', a non-violent form of resistance to oppression. Doris had met and got to know the founders of Liwan, loved them and the café project, and said she really wanted to make a documentary about it. Since I had the skills and equipment, we agreed to collaborate!
Doris and I went to Nazareth for three weeks in November 2018, with me filming and Doris handling interviews, contacts, etc, and Doris went back twice at the beginning of 2019 to film again. We ended up with dozens of hours of footage, and set about assembling it into a documentary. We raised a small amount of money via crowdfunding, enough to cover our expenses, but failed to gain any other sources of funding. So, we did the work ourselves. Doris and I collaborated on a number of cuts of the film, and ended up with one that ran to one hour. But it wasn't coherent enough, it didn't flow, and it didn't have enough emotional impact. So I worked on a re-cut, resulting in a 30-minute documentary, a version of which is what became the final movie. Again, without funding, I also did the video and sound post-production, which was a tough learning process, but rewarding. I also handled a lot of the film festival submissions. After a few initial successes, notably Leeds Palestine Film Festival and Boston Palestine Film Festival, things began to take off, and the documentary has now been featured in more than ten festivals - not bad for a first film!
Filming inside Liwan. I used the camera I had at the time, a Nikon D800 - not an ideal camera for video as it has no focus assist for manual focus, or working autofocus for video, it has no 10-bit option or log curve, etc, and the in-camera audio quality is awful (insane amounts of noise). So I'm also recording audio with a Zoom portable audio recorder at the same time - monitoring through the headphones. The lenses I mostly used were 1970s Nikon 'E' series (50mm/28mm/100mm primes).
Filming on location with journalist and Israel-Palestine specialist Jonathan Cook, at the site of the destroyed village of Saffuriya, now on the site of the Israeli moshav of Tzippori. The camera has no image stabilisation, so I used a monopod to get a steady shot while hiking around.
Filming a piano tuner in Liwan, with Doris operating a mic on a boom. We only tried the mic boom twice, as it's difficult to coordinate getting it set up quickly without a sound guy and when you need to film spontaneously.
With Silke, Doris & Sami on the last day of filming in November 2018.
Here's the trailer for Liwan. The full documentary is not available to watch online except occasionally via film festivals. For details of showings, see the web site.