Interview with the initiator Rashid Mashrawi

Interview with Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Mashrawi, the founder of Mashrawi Fund for Films and Filmmakers in Gaza and initiator of the short film compilation FROM GROUND ZERO.

Rashid Mashrawi, you are from the Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza. In 1994, your first feature length film, CURFEW, was released. It was a co-production with German public TV-channel WDR, and it was the first feature film shot in Gaza by someone from Gaza. Can you talk a bit about the idea, why you made the film and how the conditions back then were for making films in Gaza?
CURFEW was my first feature film, and we were in the Critic’s Week in Cannes and were awarded with the UNESCO Prize. I think they considered it the first Palestinian film at the festival. We, the Palestinians, made films before CURFEW and we were in Cannes before. Also, I myself made films before CURFEW, but maybe because the Palestinian Authority was already inside Gaza in 1994, the Palestinian flag could be placed  for the official selection in the Cannes Film Festival, which was impossible before. Therefore, they considered it the first feature fiction coming from Palestine.
Actually, 1994 was during the Oslo Agreement, and the film was shot during the Intifada in 1993. I wrote the script during a curfew when I was at home in Gaza. For me, it is kind of trying to find a way to express real stories from real life, from my own experience.

After the Palestinian Authority was established in Gaza, how did filmmaking evolve or continue?
When I was filming CURFEW, the Intifada was still going on. So actually, I was filming secretly. I was illegal. I needed to build some locations in a kind of studio in Nazareth and I had to film streets and roads in Gaza secretly. Everything was secret and illegal. After that, when the Palestinian Authority was established in 1995, I made my second feature film, HAIFA. At that time, the Palestinians only had Gaza and Jericho. Therefore, I filmed HAIFA in Jericho. These films functioned as kind of training workshops for Palestinians who wanted to make cinema.
Immediately after HAIFA, I decided to go back to live in Palestine and established a cinema center called the Cinema Production Center in Ramallah. This was actually the first production company or the first center in Ramallah.
I knew that to create cinema, we need to make films, and we also need to watch films. Because there were zero cinemas in Palestine after the Intifada, I established a mobile cinema for all Palestine. The mobile cinema was showing films in schools, in universities, in refugee camps, in cultural centers, and I made a film festival for kids because I think it is better to start from childhood and from youth to watch films. So there were the mobile cinema, the film festival, and workshops. And each of my films was also a workshop. Many of the Palestinian filmmakers, directors or producers, who are successful internationally now, passed by the mobile cinema, or the cinema production center, or this kind of workshops in Palestine. Some of them are big names now: Producers like May Odeh or the director of the Palestinian Cinema Days, Hanna Atallah, were trained on my films. Or the director of 200 METERS, Ameen Nayfeh, was on PALESTINE STEREO. May was on LAILA’S BIRTHDAY. Hany Abu-Assad and I made a workshop for her first short film. The cinematographer of Hany’s film, OMAR, was also trained on the short films.
I am very happy and proud. It was a big job. It was big energy to push the Palestinian filmmakers not to focus on the political situation, on being under occupation and being victims. No, we should think cinema. We should make films. We are filmmakers. The focus was there. We told the world all the time: don't support us out of solidarity. Criticize us. Judge us. We want to be filmmakers. So a lot of work done was done in this direction immediately after the Palestinian Authority came in.

And Gaza, were they part of the activities by that time? Or was Gaza in a different situation?
I started the mobile cinema, the Children’s Film Festival and the workshops in Gaza.  In 1995/1996. I was doing this for almost 10 years. I started all of this in Gaza and worked in the West Bank and Jerusalem as well, in the Palestinian territories. Besides that, we also established a cultural center with a small cinematheque, where we could premiere and discuss films, where filmmakers could meet. It was like a café with a cinema and a gallery. This was in Ramallah, to develop the cinema. When I came back to stay in Palestine in 1995, I needed to create a ground also myself, for my own work. I needed to meet filmmakers to discuss with. So I needed first to create the ground for that. Then to make films. This center closed in 2001 when I was in Holland to edit my film TICKET TO JERUSALEM and could not get back to Ramallah for a few years [due to the second Intifada, I.N.]. This is why it closed down. I was supporting other people to make a Children’s Film Festival, a mobile cinema, and to conduct trainings from far away. I took until 2005/2006 that I could return to Ramallah. Or to Palestine. The Israelis had denied my entry.

Let's go back to Gaza and talk about the compilation FROM GROUND ZERO. If I understood correctly, you started the project after the war begun. What did the situation of cinema look like in Gaza before October 2023? There were some feature documentaries coming out of the strip, but little is known about filmmaking in Gaza. Give us some context so that we can understand more about the grounds on which you could work with the directorss that you chose.
In Gaza, we had some people, men and women, who were making films, or, trying to make films. Because of the siege of almost 20 years, these filmmakers are not traveling. They are not participating in film festivals. They are not in direct exchange with other, international, filmmakers. Hence, they make mainly documentaries. Maybe one fiction film, one only. I was not happy with these films because they always smell like kind of a reportage to me. They are always based on the political situation. They are too direct,  except for one fiction film made by Khalil Al Muzayen called SARAH, in 2014, one film made by Ahmed Hassouna, and some others who were trying to do really films. Arab and Tarazan, the brothers, made the short film CONDOM LEAD in Gaza after the war of 2014. There was some experience.
Gaza has many cities, it is not one big city. I mean, the Gaza Strip. And we talk about almost two and a half million people… People love cinema - to watch films! When I was showing films in Gaza, I had more audience than I the West Bank, than in Ramallah. The screenings that I was doing in Ramallah were attended by 50 people, in Gaza 500 came to see the same film. Sometimes 1000 people came to watch a film in Gaza. I think it has to do with the Egyptian influence, and the West Bank is influenced by Jordan. In Jordan, they have cinema since 10 or 15 years. But Egypt – it is the history of cinema.
I started with the project already in the second month of the war. At the El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt in November 2023, I announced Mashrawi Fund for Films and Film-makers in Gaza. In December, I had the project FROM GROUND ZERO and we started working before knowing if we could realize it. If we can get the material out, if we have enough people to participate in the project, if we can send money or not. We learned everything during the process, during the making of FROM GROUND ZERO. Actually, FROM GROUND ZERO physically started in Gaza during the war under the bombs in December 2023.

How did the film-makers know about the project? How did you select them? Who are the people who made the 22 films of the compilation?
I know somedirectors in Gaza and artists from other disciplines like theater or music. I spoke to these people first and asked to help me to approach people who would apply. I had two, three Gazans who were outside of Gaza who helped me to contact people in Gaza to ask them to apply to FROM GROUND ZERO. I also published on social media. In a siege, once there is internet, everybody goes on social media because it is a way to be connected, to get out of the siege, especially during the war. I was not sure if I can find 20 film-makers, the idea started with 20 films. We ended up with 22 films, and we could have made thirty if we wanted, but we decided to stop to make the post-production possible.
However, how to select the film-makers? It was clear that everybody saw the war, the martyrs, the bombing…, all the catastrophes on television. They were in the media all over the world. So what can we ourselves do? The decision was to select projects (???) based on three elements. We wanted to go for the untold stories, stories that are not in the news. Furthermore, we needed the director to be talented, even if it is a first film, and most of them are first films. S/he had to be an artist with a vision. Someone who is artistically able to make, to think, cinema, because we are talking about cinema. Finally yet importantly, it needed to be realistic to film the story, given the reality on the ground. We did not want to risk anybody’s life for a film. Many times, it was dangerous during the filmmaking or for their own life like for any other Palestinian in Gaza because there is no safe place in Gaza now. But in December, January, February, March, when the main shooting of FROM GROUND ZERO took place, it was even tougher.
So: We needed the untold story, we needed film-makers, and we needed the stories to be made. Because we wanted to use FROM GROUND ZERO as training project for these film-makers, I was working also with group of advisers. There were artistic advisers, who read and developed the stories, who worked directly with the film-makers in Gaza, during the period of writing, during the shooting, and there was even a lot of discussion in the post-production between the film-makers and us about how to make the fine cut of their films. I had good film-makers, like Palestinian Layaly Badr from Egypt, Michel Kammoun from Lebanon, Abdel Salam Hajj from Jordan. I had Rasmi Damo, a Palestinian artist who is in France and Karim Traidia who is in Holland, Nadia Eliewat a Jordanian, Palestinian living in the Emirates. We were all in contact all the time. There is Laura Nikolov from France, and even the editor, the sound editor and sound mixer, the colorist; they all were kind of advisers. We tried all together to support, help and train the film-makers in Gaza. I think we did well. If I look at the films now and their effect on the audience, I am satisfied with this experience because nothing was planned. All happened during the process. That is great.

Did the film-makers see their films? Did they see some of the other films?
Every film-maker saw the rough cut, and every film-maker saw her or his final film. Every director was participating in getting the final version of her or his own film. Some of them did extra shooting. Some of them asked for a different film structure, or a different beginning or an other end, and some of them worked directly with the editor. This is regarding the films that we edited outside Gaza. Many films were edited in Gaza, but the post-production was done outside [like color correction or sound mixing, I.N.].
The beautiful thing is that all the films were shown in Gaza. Two days ago [26.7.2024, I.N.] was the opening of the Jerusalem Film Festival in the Gazan city of Deir el Balah. We showed eleven films in the presence of the directors, and tomorrow is the last day of the festival and we will show the other eleven films in the presence of the film-makers inside Gaza, between the tents. I was really touched when I received all these videos and photos. I put some in my Facebook being proud and showing my colleagues and friends how beautiful, how good, how strong Gaza is, still fighting with cinema, with art, with sculpture, amid the bombing. During the day, people come and watch the films in Gaza, and the festival is still going on today, and tomorrow is the last day. Great. I think this is a great end for the interview. It is so optimistic and so beautiful.
(Interview by Irit Neidhardt, mec film, 28.7.2024)