The Palestinian Audio-visual Project

It was with these challenges in mind that we launched the Palestinian Audio-visual Project in 2004, co-funded by the A.M. Qattan Foundation and the EU. The project has three areas of intervention. First and most significant is a major training programme in the arts of filmmaking designed and headed by the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi. The programme began in summer 2005 with a five-week foundation course for twenty-nine students from all over historical Palestine and Jordan. A few months later, nineteen students were invited back for a further three weeks. Over the following months, they participated in a scriptwriting competition and workshop resulting in three feature films and one documentary film project which will be completed by the end of 2007. Some have begun careers in production, sound recording, and as cameramen and camerawomen, others in writing and directing. Three of them have also worked on Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea, and two on Rashid Masharawi’s film A Normal Day, two of the few full-length feature films to be shot in the country in recent years.

Our aim was not only to create competent technicians but, more importantly, to offer students a rigorous work method enabling them to translate their ideas and projects into reality and to instil a sense of the importance of understanding film and audio-visual history and aesthetics. To quote Khleifi, the programme also aimed “to encourage them to build their artistic projects based on a continuous reflection upon the nature of the relationship between their subjective universe and the external, objective world.” We also wanted to offer a sense of possibility - in other words, that they too can do complex and challenging work in spite of the Occupation. This educational/cultural dimension, so vital to any creative industry, informed the second aspect of the project, namely the School Film Education Programme. Screening facilities and film clubs were established in 46 separate schools in historical Palestine (including Israel), Arabic-subtitled DVD copies of more than thirty classic international films were distributed, additional cinema masterpieces subtitled, and teachers in those schools trained to use film as a pedagogical tool. This is not simply a general initiative aimed at widening the film culture of a new generation. We believe it imperative that, in the absence of cinemas and viewing facilities (apart from commercial and state-controlled television), school children should have the democratic right to see films that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. We hope that the next phase of the project, if it happens, will involve school children making films as well.

The democratic principle also informed the third aspect of the project, which has provided distribution and DVD publishing grants for more than twenty-five films with a Palestinian theme to be distributed through the Project’s 46 school clubs and Shabaka, the Network of Arab Cinéclubs that we set up and that has a growing number of entirely voluntary members among community centres in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In this way, Palestinian films are now to be seen among the communities that they directly concern. This, it is hoped, will lay the modest foundations of a grass-roots film audience and, perhaps, a film economy.

Why is this so important? Without a grassroots and democratic film culture and a local market, there can never be an autonomous industry, whether in Palestine or anywhere else in the Arab world. Only that “natural” market, which speaks Arabic and is concerned with all things Arab, will make it possible for Arab and Palestinian films to be truly independent and persuade public and private finance that they are worthy of investment. Otherwise, our films will be for export only, exiled and severed from their home cultures.

One way forward is the establishment of a privately or publicly funded, independently managed investment fund, catering to outstanding Arab audio-visual projects on condition that they also create capacity, encourage innovation, and are properly distributed in the region. This fund could also be involved in founding a first-class, multi-disciplinary pan-Arab audio-visual academy. If these ambitious ideas do come to fruition, even if in exile, then who knows, perhaps Palestine may once again set a pioneering precedent for the Arab world.

Omar Al-Qattan is a filmmaker and the director of the Palestinian Audio-visual Project. He is also a trustee of the A.M. Qattan Foundation. For more information, see www.qattanfoundation.org/pav. This article was originally published by Vertigo magazine, London, Autumn/Winter 2007

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