Director's Statement

Now @occupiedcairo and I are back in Palestine and preparing to finally shoot riverdryfilm I'm going back over all the things that I wrote and noted down when we started this project two years ago to get back into the process.


So here's the director's statement, with only a chronological update: 

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Palestine, as a subject, can feel inaccessible and overburdened with history. Too often genuine drama and style is lost in ideology and political correctness. 


Having worked in Palestine for the last five years, living there for a month or two each year, I have been constantly struggling, thinking, writing and talking about how cinema - our most immersive artform - can hope to recreate even a fraction of the Palestinian experience. 
It is an experience that is at once deeply complex and remarkably simple. It is both cinematically physical and invisibly psychological. It can be instantly lethal and slowly maddening. 


I doubt there is a single piece of work that could ever do it all. 


But film-makers have a responsibility, art has an obligation to tell people's stories, to tell the stories that are being buried. With this short I think we can tell a relevant and resonant story, and I think we can tell it in a way that is both challenging and dramatic. 


The action will be split into three chapters; each from a different time and perspective, each circling around a central, unseen death; each with a totally distinct style and technique; each moving with the sustained pace available to a short film. 


Choosing not to tackle violence head-on, its true meaning lost between fatalistic journalism and the carnage of the multiplex, the film concentrates on the longer, subtler, suffocating experiences of occupation. The daily humuliation of crushing through checkpoints. The impossibility of living a moment free of responsibility to your cause. The thirty minute journey that now takes four hours. The unrelenting misrepresentation of you and your society. The constant threat of unpredictable and catastrophic violence. 


These are the experiences of the film. 


By pushing the form to match the subject, rather than squeezing the subject into a traditional form, we will tell the story in a style as layered as its characters deserve. We will tackle a fraught and pressing subject with cinematic originality, human sensitivity and political awareness - and so hope to contribute to the evolution of Palestine's narrative.