Rashid Masharawi
Rashid Masharawi was born and raised in Shati refugee camp, Gaza Strip. He is a self-taught filmmaker, at eighteen beginning to work in the cinema industry and acquiring skills on over twenty films before starting himself to write and direct his own. Masharawi’s films portray his knowledge of living under the Israeli Occupation in refugee camps, the new space of the intifada, as well as his constant reflection on cinema narrative:
”What I have been trying to do is make out of the Palestinian situation a cinema. I have something like fifteen films, between features, shorts, and documentaries, and together I feel they can offer a mirror and document of the Palestinian life in the last twenty years, in the same time to try to make cinema.”
After a decade of work and establishing a name as a filmmaker, Masharawi founded in 1996 the Cinema Production and Distribution Center (CPC) in Ramallah, as a way for Palestinians to have the opportunity to acquire knowledge of the field of cinema by working in actual productions. The CPC also initiated the Mobile Cinema, which brings screenings to refugee camps in the form of an annual “Kids Film Festival.”
Thus while his features such as Curfew, Haifa, Ticket to Jerusalem and documentaries such as the recent Live From Palestine have received international television broadcasting, awards and critical recognition, Masharawi considers their value as well important in reinforcing his situation as being a Palestinian feature filmmaker born in the refugee camps, who has remained in the past decades living and producing within the Occupied Territories.
In 2002, the results of Masharawi’s work on different levels and issues, is able to be seen manifested along many routes: his feature documentary Live From Palestine, his feature Ticket to Jerusalem, and in Documenta11, Kassel, the largest contemporary art exhibit in the world, with an attendance of 600,000, Masharawi was invited by artist Fareed Armaly to collaborate on one of the exhibitions largest projects, “From/To”, while parallel also having his films screened.
Filmographie
Travel Document
Short, 1986
Director: Rashid Masharawi
As the title suggests, the movement of this film’s story is linked to the issue of having an official travel document, a basic element, and plot that belongs to the director Masharawi’s own existence, and serves as an introduction for his intention of a cinema that reflects his everyday living under occupation.
The Shelter
Fiction Feature,1989
30 min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
The Shelter takes place within the cycle of one workday. It follows the two characters who represent two generations of Palestinians set in a common scenario: day workers on an Israeli construction site. On that day, the older foreman allows the younger worker Muhammed who is new on the job, to stay over night in his illegal shelter, which is a room hidden in the construction sites basement, in order so he can avoid leaving Israel which he is legally bound to. From their perspective within that confined underground space, scenes are unfolding outside, from a society they are prohibited to remain within, and of people who would prefer to keep their motives and actions from sight. The ensuing dialogue between the two represents the initial sense of transformation and imminent political change at the onset of the first Intifada just underway.
Dar O Dour
Documentary,1991
48 min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Dar O Dour (House and Houses) is a documentary shot for the British TV Channel Four. This documentary set during the first Intifada and the Gulf War follows the main character over the period of almost a year. For half of his life, the routes of the forty year old Palestinian guest worker Mohammed connect a number of different houses, each revealing an aspect of the topography of the Palestinian situation. He moves between his own house in Shati refugee camp in Gaza, the house in Tel Aviv he remains illegally over night in order to do his day worker job cleaning Israeli’s houses, and the original family house which is occupied by Israel since 1948.
Long Days In Gaza
Documentary, 1991
…
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Immediately after the Gulf War, Masharawi was asked by the BBC to shoot a documentary on the situation in the refugee camps. This film shows the diversity of thoughts and sentiments among the Palestinian people, and their unconscious sympathy with Iraq during the war.
Curfew
Fiction Feature,1993
73 min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Director Rashid Masharawi wrote the script of his first feature film Curfew during the forty days he spent confined under curfew while visiting his family in Shati refugee camp. The films shows one day in the life of a Palestinian family under a seemingly endless Israeli curfew. Set in a quiet Palestinian quarter of occupied Gaza, it evokes the pressures and displacements of life under siege: the spookily quiet streets; the mounting frustration; the tear gas clouds and electricity outages; the crackle of loudspeakers and headlights sweeping the night. Curfew conveys the Palestinian side of the Middle East crisis, and describes how civil liberties are routinely suppressed and ordinary life is not permitted to be ordinary.
Haifa
Fiction Feature,1995
75 min.
Director: Rashid Mashawari
Shot in 1995 after the signing of the Peace Treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, Haifa follows the character of the eccentric Haifa as he wanders around a Palestinian refugee camp. Named after the cosmopolitan coastal city which he has always dreamed of visiting, Haifa is trapped in the camp after refusing to accept the necessary Israeli passport that is required for travel. As his name “Haifa” already suggests an odd displacement between identity and location, he is less like a title character, but more a reason for the camp’s different private and public narratives to be connected. Everyone likes listening to him because, although they know what he desires is unobtainable, it's their dream too. As Masharawi puts it, “ I tried to make him a memory, driving nowhere all the time, facing what is happening now, carrying the past, looking to the future.”
Rabab
Short, 1997
15 min
Director: Rashid Masharawi
This is a short fiction film was developed through a workshop production. The film discusses violence
against women in the third world. It addresses imprisonment within women, and women imprisoned in jails.
Tension
Documentary, 1998
26 min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Tension conveys the palpable sense of tension below the surface of daily life that harbors within a Palestinian population in 1998, which Masharawi felt building up during this period of the ‘peace process’. Thus the film is situated in the meaning of the space between the many proclamations and statements. It focuses on the act of observation by literally eschewing spoken dialog for a narrative produced by editing imagery, music, and incidental soundtrack. Tension investigates an interminable duration, which on occasion gets measured by sudden punctuations releasing and recoiling around unforseen, perhaps even unimportant scenarios. Tension provides a frame for this worldview by opening and concluding with the natural cycle of sunrise and sunset, restated in terms of another ‘natural’ workcycle – the many waves of Palestinian dayworkers moving through gates and checkpoints to work in Israel and return in the evening.
Out of Focus
Documentary Short, 2000
15 min
Director: Rashid Masharawi
The terminology ‘out of focus’ refers to perception, meaning a visual quality even if it is used to refer to the understanding of an idea. In cinema, a film scene discovered to be shot ‘out of focus’ is generally unusable, as it destroys the continuous sense in cinema, of the otherwise natural, transparent window. In this short film, Masharawi begins this film with the idea that nothing in life is ‘out of focus’, but the interpretations can be. The short film begins with perception, taking the camera into the West Bank in order for the director to see what may lay behind the images, and offer one focus only through images, through the interpretation as a film. Masharawi states that for Out of Focus, he began with the desire, “to see what can it be after so many years is for some people still not ‘clear’ enough, what remains ‘out of focus’, such that in 2000 there is still the situation of the refugees, who are waiting.”
Behind the Walls
…
Documentary, 1999
Behind the Walls reflects the director Masharawi’s route through Jerusalem, as a city with a soul that is not divided of conflict, but in his eyes secure within its walls, wrapped over by prayers and hymns that suggest a deep history which flows and bends to support with the arches and rise as buildings to protect the city from invasions, which the film illustrates is led by the Israeli settlers.
Love Season
…
2001
During the beginning of the second intifada, it seemed the news reported the Palestinian dead as a continuing list of nothing but numbers. Masharawi chose to reverse the process, to make from the number a person, a human who was living, to retrace the weight of a life, connected to a living society, in order to return to death a gravity, not an abstract number. The director picked one of these ‘numbers’ to discover a name, an age, a mother, a wife, 2 chlidren, a favorite food, plans for the future. Their words retrace the ordinary, everyday world of a plumber, his life, who liked to swim. On the way back from swimming in the local pool, he passed in the street between crossfire, was shot and killed.
Live From Palestine
Documentary, 2002
57 min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
This documentary follows the daily dynamic of “The Voice of Palestine” - the official radio station for the Palestinian Authority -to offer a perspective on the role of this new official Palestinian media during this second Intifada. Beginning with radio journalists out on the street in the midst of covering an Israeli attack, the film proceeds to connect a network of paths in private and public space that all pass through the sender’s programming, where even the standard listener call-in program takes on a different level of meaning as the callers are seperated within different refugee camps. Over the hour many links unfold moving between the radio and the different communities, suggesting its potential is to shape a sense of identity.
Throughout Live From Palestine other PA buildings are being bombed by Israeli planes, and the threat is real for the radio as well. In editorial meetings and in the offices the employees of the radio station are open about their fears of attack. The film was ready for distribution when the Israeli Army occupied the station, prepared each room with enough explosive to guarantee the equipment destruction and thus shut down the radio’s potential as a ‘voice’- its more powerful transmission range that links to different camps. Masharawi returns as the building smolders, adding an unplanned epilogue that shifts from testimony of a community and radio station to the winess of the destruction and the disorientation of a silenced radio.
Ticket to Jerusalem
Feature, 2002
90 Min.
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Jaber is a cinema projectionist, whose wish to screen films in the refugee camps located within the disputed West Bank territory, brings him to operating a mobile cinema. His audience is mostly comprised of children. His wife, Sana, is working with the Red Crescent Ambulance, dealing with emergencies amongst the streets of the refugee camp where the couple live. Due to the deteriorating situation, both find that their life and work, so dependant on movement and accessing areas, is meeting even more obstacles, from more Israeli checkpoints to more difficult-to-obtain permits of all kinds. In the midst of these real constraints and sense of foreboding closure, Jaber suddenly receives an offer to hold a screening - in Jerusalem.
This seemingly simple invitation starts the movement of two narrative routes involving the couple. One reveals a connection to a sense of future, by how Jaber resolves the difficulties of realizing the final cinema screening, particularly the movement from refugee camp to Jerusalem. One reveals a connection to a sense of past, how the couple as refugees came to live within the newly constituted PA. Each one of these narrative routes will cross the other, more than once, always passing through the film projector in the center.
Ticket to Jerusalem is shot as a fiction, edited as a documentary, so that even the filmprojector’s movements in travel converts the surrounding situation and setting into the film’s actors. It is as if the many checkpoints, bypass roads, tanks passing by, the sidewalk in Jerusalem, and unscripted Israeli Soldiers addressing the character Jaber, are given equal time to the actual actors. The chronicle of the filmprojector’s movement between sites allows for these different vantage points, fiction and real, to intersect and come into presence slowly unfolding over time.
Checkpoint, Waiting, Homemovie
all 2002
Director: Rashid Masharawi
3 films produced for the Documenta11 exhibition “From/To”
[a project by Fareed Armaly in collaboration with Rashid Masharawi]
Checkpoint, March 11th 2002
55 min, 2002
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Kalandia Checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem
At the border of Kalandia Refugee Camp
Rashid Masharawi’s documentaries and features have included views onto the past 15 years of Palestinian life in refugee camps under Israeli Occupation. The checkpoint is a landmark that appears in the Palestinian everyday, and as well throughout the films of Masharawi. For this part of From/To, the director had planned to return to the checkpoint he knows, and document there the flow of people in daily movement. What occurred was not in the script, but came as no surprise as well. The film is an unedited single shot document, positioned on the Palestinian side of the Kalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. It witnesses the last hours of the ‘siege’, the forming of a security ‘ring’ underway, and the preparation procedure for full Occupation by the Israeli Army. It records 50 minutes of movement within the public during the early evening hours of March 11th, 2002, foreshadowing in atmosphere the shape of things to come. In the hours and weeks that followed, came the largest and most destructive military deployment from Israel since their invasion into Beirut in 1982.
Homemovie
Scene, 4 min. Loop
Director: Rashid Masharawi
The work Homemovie is comprised of different takes from a key scene in Rashid Masharawi's new feature film Ticket to Jerusalem. These unused alternate camera takes were re-edited by Masharawi to further highlight an actual closed-loop situation. It conveys the sense of repetition of movement, the expulsion in the Palestinian characters lives, and most importantly, within this ongoing repetition cycle, the projection as the seam between past events and future perspectives.
Waiting
15 Min. 2002
Director: Rashid Masharawi
Waiting observes Rashid Masharawi while he is running a casting for Palestinian actors for his next project. This is an unscripted, documentary of the actual casting, with the effects of his spoken guidelines upon the actors. Masharawi explains to the actors that he is in the process of developing a new Palestinian feature called Waiting and for this casting, he wants the actors to show him ‘how they can wait’. As actors, their initial instinct is to act ‘waiting’, as a role. Masharawi states this is not the case here, to have only ‘waiting’ itself, not acting it. Each actor discusses this in terms of desiring some direction for the waiting to have a meaning. To satisfy the director at a casting, an actor has to act – but here they can not. Masharawi works with that moment of not acting but wanting to act, but instead just wait, and the frustration evident on all levels. Waiting works with this normal frustration of being told to wait without any real reason, without a sense of ending, to offer an incisive commentary on a condition that Palestinians can address, from the individual to society, while methodologically it reflects Masharawi’s relation to the role of representation and cinema.
Awards
Curfew
The Golden Pyramid Award, Best Film, Cairo International Film Festival, 1993
The UNESCO Award, Cannes International Film Festival, France, 1994
Best Feature Film of the Institute de monde Arabe, France, 1994
Three Awards from Montpellier Film Festival-France:
Public Award, Critics Award, and Best Film.1994
Haifa
Participated in the Official selection of Cannes Film Festival,1995
Best Artistic Work awarded in the MedFilm Festival in Rome, Italy, 1996
Bronze Award of Qurtage Festival-Tunisia, 1996
Best Arabic Film in Cairo International Film Festival-Egypt, 1996
Best Foreign Film in the Jerusalem International Festival, 1996
Best Actor Award, Mohammed Bakri, [Haifa], Barcelona, Spain, 1996
Rabab
"Special Award for Distribution”, International Jury for the "Eurimages Review Europe Looks at the
Meditarannean" fourth edition of the Medfilm Festival
Live From Palestine
Special Jury Prize, Institute du Monde Arabe, 2002 Biennale
Ticket to Jerusalem
Special Jury Award, Cairo Film Festival, October 2002
Public Prize, Cinema Tout Ecran, Geneva, October 2002
1st Premi de Med Film Festival, Rome, 2002
Links
www. cineprod-center.com
http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020122.html (Democracy Now: Interview mit RM über die Sprengung der Radiostation „Voice of Palestine“ durch die isrealische Armee)
