Mai Masri listens. Every word you tell her seems important to her. She answers a question, goes back to another you asked, giving the same respect you give Mai, one of the first female filmmakers from Palestine. She is sitting at the hotel lobby of SP Grand Days in Thiruvananthapuram, looking in the direction of the Kairali theatre complex where five of her films are being screened, as part of the tenth IDSFFK (International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala).
A scene from Children of Shatila.
Children of Shatila, one of her series of films on the children at the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, was screened on the opening day of the fest, Friday. Mai had stood up then to answer questions of the audience, who asked her of the war and the trauma and the politics. She spoke patiently, smiled, and asked if someone would want to ask about the artistic side of the film, for Mai believes in the poetry that could come out of everyday life.
Sitting at the hotel lobby on Saturday, she talks about this artistic side she discovered early on in life, but didn’t know how to develop until one day she walked into a film class in the United States of America and fell in love. “I knew this was what I was searching for, without really knowing it,” she says. Impatiently she studied the art of filmmaking to come back home and give expression to all those feelings she’s had growing up a Palestinian in Lebanon, wanting to do something. She had just got back when the Lebanon war happened in 1982, and her first documentary was shot — Under the Rubble. There came eight more, and two years ago, she took her first fiction — 3000 Nights — based entirely on true incidents. “It was about a woman I met, who told me she gave birth in a prison.” True to her style, Mai kept it real. It was shot in a prison, she even brought non-actors to do some roles.
Scene from 3000 nights.
It seems important to her, to tell her stories in new ways. So in Children of Shatila, she gave two video cameras to two children — Farah and Issa — who went with it, asking older people — friends and family — of what Palestine had meant to them, before they were dispossessed. These children then seem to imagine a homeland with birds and colours, olive trees and citrus fruits. “Perhaps the birds there are different from the ones here. If you have a bird here, does that mean you’d know the colour of the bird over there,” Issa asks in the documentary. Farah says, “Imagining is the main thing, even if you only draw a bird.”
Mai wanted to tell her stories through children to capture that spontaneity, that imagination. She too had been very young when she went to take her first film. She knew that it was a risky medium, that she was exposing herself at times of war. Once, while shooting Frontiers of dreams and fears, she was shot on the leg. “But I don’t really talk about it. That was the scale of suffering, everywhere around me.” A bullet shot, a wound was too common. It never stopped her of course, nothing has. That love she found at the age of 17 in an American classroom stayed with her. Even when she had to face neglect as a woman, and sometimes not taken seriously. “Did you know though that the first studios in Palestine were set up in the 1930s by women? When I started, it was uncommon but now about 50 per cent of the films made in Palestine are by women. Even in the US, it is less than 7 or 8 per cent.”
Scene from Frontiers of dreams and fears.
These films have made all the difference to her. If someone were to document her life, that’s what she’d say. Mai narrates an incident here. A day when she was walking through the ruins after the war, and how through all that misery, she heard the laughter of children. She saw young faces peeping out from behind the broken buildings, a picture of hope. She spoke to them, to women, who would all become characters in her documentaries. She and her husband Jean Chamoun with whom she worked together for the first few films, would live with them, become close, before filming them. She finds the personal, even when she filmed the story of a political figure like Hanan Ashrawi. Her content, you realise, comes in understanding their stories so well she could tell it like her own.
