Other side of Gaza: Irish film-makers highlight ordinary lives in the besieged territory
A pair of Irish film-makers have made a documentary on life for ordinary people in the besieged territory, writes
WHEN Dublin audiences sit down to watch Gaza, the new documentary made by Irish director Garry Keane and Northern Irish photographer Andrew McConnell, they may pause for a moment to consider that the stars of the film they’re about to watch have yet to see the film themselves.
Because Gaza, home to almost two million Palestinian people, and just 25 miles long and five miles wide, has no cinema.
Keane is trying to arrange a screening for the stars of his feature-length documentary, which attempts to provide a taste of life in the densely populated strip of land, the scene of frequent conflict with Israel, which borders it on three sides and controls the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza.
“Yeah, you think you’ll arrange a projector and a town hall and chairs and have a screening and drink a load of tea, but that simple little event is unbelievably difficult in Gaza,” Keane says, sighing. “We’ve set our sights on April. We want to get them all together and share the experience of watching it on a big screen, the way it should be watched.”
Gaza will screen on Saturday at Dublin International Film Festival. Shot over four years, the film’s characters include a taxi driver, a fisherman with 40 children, a teenage cellist and a little boy who dreams of captaining his own fishing boat as they navigate the numbing conditions they live through, finding hope in music, family and the sea.
Unemployment, squalor, power-cuts, impenetrable borders and the outbreaks of violence that punctuate Gazan life underscore the lives of the film’s cast.
“There is a barrier in Gaza that keeps people from life itself,” theatre director Ali Abu Yassin says in the film. “A barrier between people and their dreams.”
OPEN PRISON
One character describes Gaza as the world’s largest open prison; Keane says the phrase drew criticism at recent screenings at Sundance Film Festival, where Gaza premiered at the World Cinema competition and where Q&A sessions on a film dealing with a notoriously politically divisive topic were sometimes “fiery”.
Yet ironically, two Gazans involved in the film, Abu Yassin and fixer and cameraman Fady Hanoun, who had planned on attending Sundance, were prevented from travel due to Gaza’s Egyptian border being closed in January.
“One journalist said, ‘don’t you think the open prison line is a sensational term trotted out for headlines?’” Keane says.
“We had two of the best immigration lawyers in America, we had Senator Diane Feinstein’s office, Mitt Romney’s office, and the whole of Sundance trying to help these guys get to a film festival, and we failed,” Keane says. “I said to the journalist: ‘I think if all that effort went into getting two guys out of a high-security prison, we would have succeeded.’”
Keane, from Ballyshannon in Donegal, and his co-director Andrew McConnell, a photographer from 50km over the border in Enniskillen, say they felt driven to show a different view of Gaza from that commonly portrayed in the media.
“Was there something with Andrew being a Catholic from one side of the border in Enniskillen and me from the other side, are borders ingrained in our psyches from an early age? I don’t know,” he says.
“You can’t go into Gaza and tell the story of the place without the political background; it’s unavoidable. But we believe the material facts of the situation are regularly carried in media around the world and we don’t think it’s our job to do that. We just wanted to try to capture the essence of everyday life.”
This nuanced essence includes locals unhappy with the fundamentalist grip of Hamas, and the class divide between the relative affluence of middle-class Gazans and the impoverished children of Deir Al-Balah refugee camp.
But there has been criticism of the film, Keane says: “Some Israeli groups said we didn’t show Hamas firing rockets into Israel. The reality is, we couldn’t get the footage. We would have shown it if we had; we showed Hamas armed on the street and having mass rallies.”
“We did what we could to show balance, but it’s not a balanced conflict. It’s boys against men, it’s stones against bullets, it’s home-made rockets against one of the best-equipped armies in the world. We’re not apologising for that to any extent.”
Keane and McConnell originally met to discuss an entirely different project when their mutual fascination with Gaza became apparent. It was 2014, the year of the conflict that claimed the lives of 2,251 Palestinians and 73 Israelis.
McConnell, who has frequently worked in war-torn countries, entered Gaza on recce for the documentary just as the bombardment worsened. “It was pretty scary,” Keane recalls. “He thought it would be a week or two, but it went on for 50 days. Contact wasn’t great and we were constantly trying to get in touch with him, but he made it through.”
Following Keane’s first trip to Gaza in 2015, when he and McConnell shot for five weeks, they returned in 2018. Their return coincided with the Great March of Return protests that gave rise to the worst violence in the region since 2014. On the 14th of May, 60 Palestinians were shot dead at the border. It was a predicted clash, Keane says.
“We thought the film needed to show it,” Keane says. “We knew that was going to be a horrible day and we knew it was a moment in time we needed to capture, to make that point that the conflict is endless.”
Keane has made films for a quarter century and has won four IFTAs for documentaries he’s directed, including an episode of RTÉ’s Toughest Place To Be series, among the street sweepers of Manila.
But he says the toughest place of all to be was Gaza.
“We became very close to the people in our film and that made it tremendously difficult. “They became like family; we’re still in almost daily contact with some of them. I think this has been the most difficult thing I’ve done in 25 years.”
Documentaries at Dublin Film Festival
