One of Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi’s aims is to change people’s perception of Palestinian cinema as only about an oppressed nation, but while filming Letters from Al Yarmouk, set in a refugee camp, he found himself personally involved in the sorrowful reality.
One of the difficulties of filming was dealing with people whose lives are always threatened, the director said on Sunday.
The film, which is competing in the Muhr Feature competition at Dubai International Film Festival, is a documentary about the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp that has been under siege for two years amid the crisis in Syria.
“Usually I make feature films that have a scenario, a timeline and characters,” Masharawi said. However, he explained that Letters from Al Yarmouk was a different experience as he worked on a complex topic that has no beginning and no end. “Right now, the camp is still under siege and people have no food, electricity and water.”
Speaking more about the difficulties facing him while filming, Masharawi said that the sorrowful reality at the camp was affecting him psychologically, especially “when [he saw] a woman who didn’t have food and wanted to eat in order to breastfeed her child.”
Masharawi added that he was becoming part of the story and was concerned about people’s simplest details at the camp.
Regarding the challenges facing Palestinian films, Masharawi said cinema should become independent as a cinematic language that is not only limited to politics. He added that along with its leading competition among other world films, Palestinian cinema was also raising important topics that can be relevant to the viewers.
However, Masharawi said it was important to change people’s perspectives about Palestinian cinema instead of only seeing it as material about an oppressed nation with whom they empathise.
Speaking about his future projects, Masharawi said that he was preparing for a long feature film about Gaza, noting that the war in the strip is continuing.
