Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi opens the Cairo Film Festival with the world premiere of his new film “Passing Dreams” — that most unlikely of genres: the Palestinian road movie.
The film tells the story of Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash), a 12-year-old living in a refugee camp in the West Bank. His father is in jail and his carrier pigeon has flown away so he heads off to Bethlehem to ask his uncle (Ashraf Barhom) to help him find the lost bird.
While not shying away from the realities of life in the Occupied Territories, the film remains optimistic. Masharawi agrees, talking with Variety on the eve of the festival: “Where there is no hope, cinema should invent it just to show it to the people and make them touch it and believe in it because this also is part of our resistance. After all the years of occupation, still now we have hope, because we like tomorrow.”
Filming in the real locations in the West Bank, Bethlehem, old city of Jerusalem and Haifa was unsurprisingly a challenge: “For Palestinian filmmakers to make a fiction [film] is very difficult. It must all be planned before, because of the light, the actors, and the people coming from outside of Palestine. You always have plan A, plan B and plan C. Most of the time, we’re in plan B or C.”
Moving cast and crew between locations was difficult. “They’re from different places and everyone needs different permits just to move from one place to the other. We’re filming without permission from the Israel authorities. And the mood of everybody can change because anything could happen, and everything was happening during the shoot.”
What was happening was the conflict in Gaza where Masharawi was born, his family having fled from Jaffa. “I was born in Gaza in 1962. My first memory was a war. I lived between checkpoints. It was part of the landscape. To get to Bethlehem I had to pass three checkpoints, the journey of an hour.”
The use of real locations though was vital, primarily for the Palestinian audience. “They know these places; what road they would have to take and the checkpoints. I don’t want to make shots like postcards. I want to be practical, going from A to B and showing a landscape. I was between showing the beauty but not exploring it like a tourist, even though I was in Bethlehem, one of the most important tourist sites in the world. Our characters just pass by because they’re on their way somewhere else.”
Although Masharawi is deeply concerned with Gaza – earlier this year, he produced “From Ground Zero,” an anthology of shorts filmed during the ongoing conflict – he insists on his role as a filmmaker first and foremost. As a filmmaker whose films have bowed at a host of festivals including Venice and Cannes, he is delighted to open Cairo, but for his films, rather than any political point. “I’m not searching for any solidarity because of the political situation: I want everyone to deal with us as filmmakers. Before being Arab, or Palestinian, or from Gaza, I love cinema.”
