Film Show 047: Rashid Masharawi
An interview with the Palestinian filmmaker about his new feature-length movie 'Passing Dreams', the Gazan omnibus film 'From Ground Zero', and setting up workshops and screenings in refugee camps
Rashid Masharawi
Rashid Masharawi was born in Gaza in 1962 and grew up in Al-Shati refugee camp after his family fled ongoing Israeli attacks on their home city of Jaffa. Starting at age 18, Masharawi began a self-guided study in film production, a process which culminated in his first short film, Travel Document (1987). After a decade of working in occupied Palestine, Masharawi founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Centre (CPC) in Ramallah in 1996, an entity chiefly devoted to organizing workshops for young Palestinian filmmakers and providing on-set work in active film productions. Masharawi’s CPC also created a Mobile Cinema unit, which projected films inside of refugee camps, including an annual Children’s Film Festival. In addition to his mentoring programs and advocacy on behalf of a Palestinian cinema, Masharawin has continued to direct his own films—Passing Dreams (2024) just opened the Cairo International Film Festival this past November.
Passing Dreams finds 11 year-old Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash) living in a refugee camp in the West Bank. With his father in prison and his faithful carrier pigeon lost, Sami heads off to Bethlehem to ask his uncle (Ashraf Barhom) for help finding his lost bird. The film nests personal portrait and genre convention inside vérité-style location shooting, a formal dichotomy that pings more than a few of the works found in From Ground Zero (2024). Composed of 22 short films from 22 different filmmakers, From Ground Zero enacts Masharawi’s workshop theory of filmmaking in explicit form, running through a multitude of forms that range from narrative fiction to confessional documentary. The works are written in languages as disparate as stop motion animation, musical performance, and puppetry. Most movingly, to consult the biographies of the filmmakers involved is to witness film (Ahmed Hassouna, “Sorry Cinema”) and television (Islam Al Zeriei, “Flashback”) professionals producing work alongside theater makers (Tamer Nijim, “The Teacher”), therapeutic art workers (Alaa Damo, “24 Hours”), journalists (Hana Eleiwa, “NO”), and all manner of storyteller. The point isn’t as pat as suggesting that anybody can be an artist; surely that point is true and needs no insistence. Rather, From Ground Zero achingly presents art and life as equally fundamental entities, like air or sleep. Even during ongoing genocide, we miss our fathers, our birds. We move towards home.
Masharawi acted as producer and artistic mentor on the project, which finds his enthusiasm and rigor combine into an omnibus film that’s as wrenching as it is hopeful. On the occasion of From Ground Zero’s wide US release—and its shortlisting for an Academy Award—I spoke with Rashid via video chat. While we spoke in the days preceding the January 19th announcement of a ceasefire, it remains clear that Israeli attacks against Palestinians will continue so long as the occupation does.
Frank Falisi: Hi Rashid. I apologize for the view of my car you’re getting.
Rashid Masharawi: It’s okay, this is not important. What’s important is what we’re talking about, not where we’re sitting.
How are you doing?
I am fine. How much it’s possible to be fine, you know, but I am fine, yes.
How are all of the filmmakers who are involved in this film? Is everyone safe, all things considered?
It’s been… let’s say, they stay alive. They are alive. Some of them are not really in safe places. This is why we are in contact almost daily. And some of them, it’s more than one time a day. But I mean, they are moving from one place to another, sometimes more than one place in the same day. And lately, some of them are losing some people, some relatives. Except for two or three of them, they have no houses.
Have you worked with most of these artists before? Or were you familiar with their work, at least?
I knew—but hadn’t really worked with—three or four out of the twenty-two. But most of them are new. Some of them, I know not as filmmakers, but as people that are interested in cinema. They made small, short films. They are cameramen, actors from theater, directors of theater, painters, and now they’ve made a film with us. And most of them, it’s their first film.
What was your role, working with these folks? Especially for first-time directors?
In the beginning, I was selecting the ideas and selecting the people. And I worked with them to develop the idea, then discussed the shooting because this material must be edited, you know? The content was very important for me. I mean, what’s possible artistically, technically—you have to imagine we worked without equipment, with no professional crew or assistants. Some of the filmmakers were the director and the cameraman, most of them were the story and the storyteller.
So I’m the one who has more distance from the daily details on locations. I had this vision all the time, trying to go for untold stories. Because we know all the time what the news is showing, day and night, especially in the beginning of this war, January, February, March, April. Most of the shooting was done in these months, but continued until almost June. So my role: I was the artistic supervisor for all of these films, along with some assistants who work with me. And I had advisors work with the directors, share ideas, try to develop their stories, give comments and make rough cuts, things like that. And to keep it so that it looks like them, because it’s their film, you know? This is why you have different genres in From Ground Zero. You have documentary, fiction, you have experimental, video art, stop motion, even marionettes. They are different, which means they have different ways to express their own cinema. Not only different ideas or feelings, but tools, too.
You said something, that a lot of these artists are not only the storyteller, but they’re the story too. That feels like it could be both a gift but also an expectation on the kind of story you’re able to tell.
You know, when we started this idea, when we were making these films, the situation on the ground was very dangerous. There were no safe places in Gaza. So for someone to search for an idea, he went to himself, he went to his family. He went to his mind, his own mind. He earned the feeling, he earned the location, let’s say, and he earned what he wanted to share with the world. It’s kind of a protection, because nobody went to research to search for an idea. Some of the filmmakers could not go with their idea because reality interfered. So the idea changed. But personal stories, this was my decision.
How do you make a personal cinema when so much of the world assumes that it’s a political act, simply by its existence? Does that make sense as a question?
No, it’s very important. It’s a very important question and it makes a lot of sense. First, I was not trying to deal with politics, because the politics is there. We are full of politics. Each frame. It’s politics because all that you see is a result of a political situation. The Palestinian struggle did not start on October 7th. It started more than 76, 77 years ago. And we don’t need these films to have political debate. We belong to nobody. We are not working under any authority, we did not get support from any authorities to say “We believe in Palestinian authority” or “We believe in Hamas” or “We make this film with the aim of showing the world the massacres and the genocide and all of what Israel did.” It’s all there. It means we need to go for real, personal stories of the daily life of people and filmmakers who deal with culture. We make it to try and make art all the time, to share it with the world. I believe it’s a kind of resistance to share it with the world, not only the film, but the fact that there are people thinking that now, today and here in the middle of this bloody area, in the middle of hundreds of martyrs dying a day, we are trying to protect our identity. We are trying to protect our dreams.
These things nobody can occupy, you know? Nobody can occupy dreams or thoughts or ideas. You have your ideas, you have your dreams, you are a free person like others. Okay, they can kill us because they have the possibilities. They have weapons, they have equipment, they have the technology, they have the support of the big countries in the world with money and military facilities. But our existing in the area—nobody can occupy that. You talk about culture, history, identity… cinema can take all these things. Cinema can deal with these things. This is why I love cinema. I trust cinema. I count on cinema. Cinema has a space to deliver all these things, especially when you are honest and you tell the truth, which is reality.
I really love that phrase, “I love cinema.” Do you remember the first time you felt that this was an artform that you could put your dreams into?
Many years ago, yes. Many, many years ago. And it’s repeated itself many times. I’ve made films as a director for the last 35 years, maybe more. I’ve made only films in my life. I started when I was around 20 and now I am more than 60 years old and I am in cinema. Cinema protects me and makes me able to face how I spend my life. Cinema was my shelter; I could talk to the world.
I remember when I was 25, 26 years old, I had a film in Berlin, in competition. The film was called The Shelter (1989). And they were discussing then, Is there a Palestinian cinema? Is there something called ‘Palestine’? How are we going to make the identity of this film a nation? Then, we were not allowed to write ‘Palestine’—there was no ‘Palestine’ to exist in their catalog. So they were busy with all of those things and I was busy making my films. And cinema pushed them to discuss Palestine. It was 40 years ago. I was not going to ‘do Palestine.’ I’m going to do films, stories.
So really, I trust cinema, and I believe we, the Palestinians, we have a state in cinema. It doesn’t exist on the ground, it’s bigger, it’s stronger in the cinema. Because in the ground, you see the image, yes? In cinema, you have the history. I am from Jaffa, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was occupied by Israel in 1948 and now they name it Israel. This is in cinema. So if I tell my story of Jaffa, it’s so deep, it’s so strong, it’s so beautiful. They have theaters in Jaffa and they have cinemas in Jaffa and they have life and they have vacations. They have the sea. They have everything, you know? Cinema can carry us.
You just had a film open recently, right? Has working in this capacity as a kind of artistic producer on From Ground Zero got you dreaming about getting back to directing yourself?
I am making films all the time. My last film, Passing Dreams (2024), was the opening of the Cairo International Film Festival. Three weeks ago, it’s in Tunis, a big festival. And soon it will be in many festival in Europe. It also has distribution and co-production and stars—I’m making films all the time. This was my feature number nine. So I am swimming in my water. But this time, in this way, I decided my next film was going to be different. It’s going to give a chance to 22 filmmakers from Gaza, from the ground, to make them bring the idea, to make them do my next project, because they have the rights to tell their own stories and I can help them. I have experience, I have relations, I know companies, I know festivals, I know media. I can help and support. I know cinema. I mean our cinema, when I say “know cinema.” Because I don’t think anybody knows cinema. It’s not something that somebody can know. But I know our cinema, how to produce it, how to show it. Cinema is an unfinished experience. It will never finish. We all experiment in cinema. I mean all the filmmakers in the world. There’s no recipe to tell you, do one, two, three, and you have the best film in the world.
If I talk about the “real” cinema, I’m not talking about commercial things or people who want to make money and make something easy to sell, easy to watch. This is not our cinema. Cinema is everybody experimenting. And I believe there are people not born yet who will make much, much better films than all the big stars and big directors in cinema. So it is not finished.
I think unfinished is right. Can you talk a little bit about exhibiting films in Palestinian refugee camps? That seems an important part of keeping cinema as a continuous process.
The last exhibition in a refugee camp was in this war, between the tents of refugees. We made a film festival in Gaza and we showed all the films in From Ground Zero between the tents, with the filmmakers. I have photos from these screenings inside Gaza, during this war, with people watching their own life under bombing. Historically, we have no cinemas in Palestine. I was running, for many years, a mobile cinema, which was showing films in schools and universities, refugee camps, villages, just to make people watch films. Because I had, in Ramallah, the Cinema Production and Distribution Center. It’s a production and training center. I had this for many years, to try and develop the Palestinian cinema. Most of the filmmakers and producers from the Palestinian cinema now who are showing films in the world, they passed by there, through those workshops.
Can you talk a little about the art scene in Ramallah, and maybe how it impacts art creation in Gaza?
From Ground Zero is all shot from Gaza, which is far from Ramallah. And Gaza is in siege, before this war. So they did not even have the possibilities to communicate with the outside world. They did not have the possibilities to get experience in cinema, because to get experience, you need the cinema atmosphere. You need to watch films, to talk about films, to experiment to make films. And they don’t have this in Gaza. There are very few people in the West Bank trying to make cinema, where in Ramallah, it’s more open. It’s next to Jerusalem, people can fly, can participate in different festivals in the world. Like me.
I’m a Gazan. I was born and grew up in Gaza, but I live in Ramallah. So I was travelling all the world to festivals, and I was able to watch films and read critics on my films and learn many things during the process of my own filmmaking. Let’s say in Gaza, they don’t have this possibility. But Ramallah, for me, it’s between real and fake. On one hand, it looks like free life. But it’s under Israeli occupation. On one hand it looks like we have a president, we have ministers, we have ministries, we have everything that looks like a state. But we have no states. It is upside down. In Ramallah, we have peace and war and calm and intifada in the same day. We are a state and we are occupied territories in the same day.
But I am happy that for From Ground Zero, I made a kind of workshop for more than a hundred people. Because you work with 22 filmmakers, everybody has four or five assistants on their own film. So more than a hundred people dealing with cinema in spite of everything. Yeah, that’s okay.
It feels like the film itself turns into a workshop.
It is, yeah. Clearly, yes it is. Because some of these filmmakers, now they’re making more films. Some of them with me, some of them without me. But the project itself encouraged them. It showed how important a link with the world is. We were officially selected for the Toronto International Film Festival. We had many, many screenings in Italy, in the UK. We had almost the entire Arabic world. I made a big event in Cannes for From Ground Zero. So the filmmakers feel the importance of being a filmmaker and making films. Now they know. In the beginning of From Ground Zero, I was explaining to them all the time, “You have to do what you can. It’s your role now to play. You have to participate. We need the image. We need to tell our stories.” Now they can tell me these things.
That’s a pretty beautiful note to end on. Is there anything you’ve wanted to say about this movie that you haven’t been asked about yet?
I don’t know. I always have many things to say about From Ground Zero, because me myself, I am still in the situation because the war did not finish, you know? Things are going on. I can say that these films were written, shot, edited, in many festivals, now shortlisted for an Oscar. And the war is still going on. What we need to do is not only keep showing films. We need to stop this war. We need to end this massacre. We need to give a chance to these people to live normal lives like others. I want to tell others outside Gaza—who are in the world—that because we are all human beings, we are all sharing this life. That means in Gaza, they are not only killing us—the Palestinians—they are killing you also. As a human being, we are sharing this aspect together. They kill you in Gaza every day. I want these films to show these elements.
More information about From Ground Zero’s screening dates can be found here.
Thank you for reading the 47th issue of Film Show. From the river to the sea.
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