Film’s ‘search for Palestine’ takes centre stage at Cairo festival

CAIRO: The tale of a distinctly Palestinian road trip – through refugee camps and Israeli checkpoints – takes centre stage in director Rashid Masharawi’s latest film, which debuted at this year’s Cairo International Film Festival.

“It’s a search for home, a search for Palestine, for ourselves,” Masharawi told AFP a day after Wednesday’s world premiere of his new film “Passing Dreams”.

It kicked off the Middle East’s oldest film festival, which opened with a traditional dabkeh dance performance by a troupe from the war-torn Gaza Strip.

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Masharawi’s film follows Sami, a 12-year-old boy, and his uncle and cousin on a quest to find his beloved pet pigeon, which has flown away from their home in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

Told that pigeons always return to their birthplace, the family attempts to “follow the bird home” – driving a small red camper van from Qalandia camp and Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank to the Old City of Jerusalem and the Israeli city of Haifa.

Their odyssey, Masharawi says, becomes a “deeply symbolic journey” that represents an inversion of the family’s original displacement from Haifa during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel – a period Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.

“It’s no coincidence we’re in places that have a deep significance to Palestinian history,” the director said, speaking to AFP after a more intimate second screening on Thursday.

‘From Ground Zero’

The bittersweet tale is a far cry from Masharawi’s other project featured at the Cairo film festival: ‘From Ground Zero’.

The anthology, supervised by the veteran director, showcases 22 shorts by filmmakers in Gaza, shot against the backdrop of war.

For that project, Masharawi – who was the first Palestinian director officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival for his film ‘Haifa’ in 1996 – “wanted to act as a bridge between global audiences” and filmmakers on the ground.

In April, he told AFP the anthology intended to expose “the lie of self-defence”, which he said was Israel’s justification for its devastating military campaign in Gaza.

The war broke out following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

The Israeli aggression in Gaza has since killed more than 43,700 people in the enclave.

“As filmmakers, we must document this through the language of cinema,” Masharawi said, adding that filmmaking “defends our land far better than any military or political speeches”.

Smuggled onto set

Speaking to an enthralled audience, the 62-year-old director – donning his signature fedora – called for change in Palestinian filmmaking.

“Our cinema can’t always only be a reaction to Israeli actions,” he said.

“It must be the action itself.”

A self-taught director born in a Gaza refugee camp before moving to Ramallah, Masharawi is intimately familiar with the “obstacles to filmmaking under occupation” – including “separation walls, barriers, who’s allowed to go where”.

Like the family in the film, “you never know if authorities will let you get to your location”, he said, especially since Masharawi refuses “on principle” to seek permits from Israeli authorities.

Instead, his crew often resorts to makeshift schemes – including “smuggling in” actors from the West Bank who do not have permission to visit Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

“If you ask (Israeli authorities) for permission to shoot in Jerusalem, you’re giving them legitimacy that Jerusalem is theirs,” he said Thursday to raucous applause from audience members, many of them draped in Palestinian keffiyehs.

Organisers cancelled the Cairo film festival last year after calls for the suspension of artistic and cultural activities across the Arab world in solidarity with Palestinians.

But this week, keffiyehs have dotted the red carpet, while audience members wore pins bearing the Palestinian flag and the map of historic Palestine.

Festival president Hussein Fahmy voiced solidarity “with our brothers in Gaza and Lebanon”, where Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive have killed 3,360 people.

Pride of place, Fahmy said, has been given to Palestinian cinema, with a handful of films showing during the festival and a competition to crown a winner among the 22 filmmakers in ‘From Ground Zero’.