Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, many here. No such thing is actually off
Speaker 1: this week, but don't worry because we still have something
Speaker 1: for you to listen to. This week, we're hosting an
Speaker 1: episode of Origin Stories, a new show from Campside Media.
Speaker 1: Every week, on Origin Stories, veteran journalist Matthew Cher talks
Speaker 1: to a writer or a director about a project close
Speaker 1: to their heart. On this week's Origin Stories, Matthew talks
Speaker 1: to a Palestinian filmmaker who uses his mother's old home
Speaker 1: video footage to tell a story about what it was
Speaker 1: like to live in the West Bank during the Second Intifada.
Speaker 1: No such thing will be back next week, but in
Speaker 1: the meantime, enjoy this episode of Origin Stories Campsite Media.
Speaker 2: Suha films everything, birthdays, bedtime routines, Chris mess and holidays.
Speaker 2: She lives in the West Bank with her husband and
Speaker 2: two young children. She's got a relatively comfortable middle class life,
Speaker 2: but all that changes in the early two thousands during
Speaker 2: what's known as the Second Intofada, a mass Palestinian uprising
Speaker 2: against the Israeli occupation. When Israel launches a round of
Speaker 2: retaliatory attacks, Suha does what she's always done. She picks
Speaker 2: up her camera and films it all, the barrages of bombs,
Speaker 2: the late night sheltered in the basement, her children's panic,
Speaker 2: and somehow even in the middle of it all, Suha
Speaker 2: captures an intimate and truly remarkable portrait of life under siege.
Speaker 2: Nearly two decades later, her son Yusef, finds the home
Speaker 2: video footage. Yello Jima read great dim yellah habit is up.
Speaker 2: There are some, Yusef, for some the iraland wish, for
Speaker 2: some the ertanic bar suit.
Speaker 3: I would look at myself and I would just see
Speaker 3: two empty black holes as I was hearing my mom
Speaker 3: described me as a child the same way that I
Speaker 3: saw myself in my most vulnerable moment that killed me.
Speaker 2: And he decides to finish the story his mother started.
Speaker 3: She's like, when I was filming it, I hope that
Speaker 3: one day we could share it with the world. And
Speaker 3: I told her, well, I think that day has come.
Speaker 2: That's this week on Origin Stories. Welcome back to Origin Stories.
Speaker 2: Today we're going to be talking to Yusef Cheruzi, the
Speaker 2: award winning documentarian. Yusef grew up in Palestine but left
Speaker 2: when he was young and finished high school in Qatar.
Speaker 2: Studied Economics at the University of British Columbia. He's also
Speaker 2: got a master's in development economics from Berkeley. He did
Speaker 2: not take the traditional route to filmmaking, in other words,
Speaker 2: but about six years ago he and a friend, Mary
Speaker 2: el Ollentine, began assembling a documentary about Yusef's time during
Speaker 2: the Second Intafada, the years long Palestinian uprising against the
Speaker 2: Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As source material,
Speaker 2: they used hours of home footage captured by Yusef's mother,
Speaker 2: of the family attempting to survive in a time of
Speaker 2: pitched conflict. It's a beautiful documentary. There's fear and anguish,
Speaker 2: but also real joy, real love, and above all the
Speaker 2: sense that life doesn't stop in battle. He carries on
Speaker 2: one way or another. Three Promises won the Harrald Award
Speaker 2: for Best Documentary at the nineteenth annual Camden Film Festival,
Speaker 2: and was also a finalist for the twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: Henry Award for Public Interest Documentary at Harvard. Yusef, Welcome
Speaker 2: to Origin Stories.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Matt, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: I want to start here with the unconventional path to
Speaker 2: this documentary. So we're dealing with footage that is old,
Speaker 2: that was captured a while back, and in the meantime,
Speaker 2: after this footage is captured, you go off and have
Speaker 2: a different kind of career. Talk to me about when
Speaker 2: you make this decision. Okay, I've got this amazing footage
Speaker 2: here and I want the world to see it.
Speaker 3: It was about fifteen years from the events until I
Speaker 3: found the footage again. So we had left Palestine in
Speaker 3: two thousand and three, and in twenty eighteen, as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: I was doing my masters at Berkeley. I had met
Speaker 3: Mary Elle there and she had background in filmmaking, and
Speaker 3: she had grown up in a pro Palestinian family, so
Speaker 3: she was excited to meet someone who grew up in
Speaker 3: Palestine and was asking me questions about my time living
Speaker 3: in the Second End to father. So that triggered some
Speaker 3: of my own questions that I had for my parents,
Speaker 3: unanswered questions that I grew up with and haven't thought
Speaker 3: about in many years. I was visiting my parents, we
Speaker 3: were out for dinner, and I started asking my dad specifically,
Speaker 3: just as a young man, and I was curious, you know,
Speaker 3: what it was like being a father, a man in
Speaker 3: his early thirties going through such a thing, and he
Speaker 3: was like, we have footage of that, and my mom
Speaker 3: was not happy at the time that he mentioned it.
Speaker 3: I was shocked. I was like, what do you mean,
Speaker 3: we have footage. So as soon as we went home,
Speaker 3: my dad had already digitized a lot of our home
Speaker 3: video footage from the nineties and the early two thousands,
Speaker 3: So we put in the DVD player, it off and
Speaker 3: just five minutes into watching it, and you know, for
Speaker 3: those who have seen the film, it was that footage
Speaker 3: when we were me and my sister and my father
Speaker 3: were hiding in my grandparents' basement where it was safer
Speaker 3: and having our interactions, and just seeing five minutes of
Speaker 3: that scene, I immediately felt an obligation, really deep down
Speaker 3: that I have to share this. It's so rare to
Speaker 3: see such intimate moments in a war zone, you know,
Speaker 3: in a family that, for better or worse, can be
Speaker 3: universally related to So I immediately asked my dad if
Speaker 3: I could have all of the footage, and I told
Speaker 3: my mom, I'm going to take this back to California
Speaker 3: with me and I am gonna make a movie out
Speaker 3: of it. And that's how it started. And I took
Speaker 3: it back to Maryelle. The first thing I had to
Speaker 3: do was translate all of it, put the English subtitles,
Speaker 3: and watch all the hours that we had of footage.
Speaker 2: He said, if I want to ask you about the
Speaker 2: fact that your family had all this foot and was
Speaker 2: recording in this way, which strikes me as unusual at
Speaker 2: the time. Now, we film everything, you know, when I
Speaker 2: look through my phone, I film every aspect of my life.
Speaker 2: But this was a time before we started doing that.
Speaker 2: So what was it that drove your mother to make
Speaker 2: these recordings.
Speaker 3: I've asked my mother this question, and she said that
Speaker 3: at the time she felt that maybe one day she
Speaker 3: could share our story with the world. She mentions this
Speaker 3: in the film as well. You know, the news media
Speaker 3: weren't really speaking about what was happening in the second
Speaker 3: in Fada back then, and there was no social media,
Speaker 3: so if you don't watch al Jazeira Arabic specifically, you
Speaker 3: have no idea what's happening. So you know, she felt
Speaker 3: an obligation to pick up the camera on film. But
Speaker 3: from my perspective as well, you know, we've always filmed.
Speaker 3: I had more hours of footage in the nineties, like
Speaker 3: pre into Fodo. Then I could count because my parents
Speaker 3: filmed everything. They filmed every birthday, every Christmas, every event,
Speaker 3: every time our friends came over from school and we
Speaker 3: were playing. And I don't know where that came from.
Speaker 3: I mean my grandfather, my dad's dad, also filmed a lot,
Speaker 3: and he had a huge archive. He's from Nazareth and
Speaker 3: kept old pictures of Nazareth from pre nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 3: from pre the state of Israel, and had them all
Speaker 3: organized in folders and was using Dropbox in like twenty
Speaker 3: ten as like an eighty ninety year old man. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's in the genes or in the household that my
Speaker 3: parents grew up around. But the camera was always there
Speaker 3: when we were kids.
Speaker 2: When you looked back and started watching these all again,
Speaker 2: obviously remembered a lot of what had happened. But was
Speaker 2: it different than what you remembered. Was there a gap
Speaker 2: between what was in your head from these experiences and
Speaker 2: what you saw on film?
Speaker 3: Lesser than I would have liked, to be honest, I
Speaker 3: started to question if these memories that I have of
Speaker 3: the second and to Faddos are memories that I made
Speaker 3: up or that I dramatized. You know, memories tend to
Speaker 3: shape and get reshapen over the years, but the footage
Speaker 3: definitely provided validation for my memories that I think gave
Speaker 3: me more power to move on and it gets stronger
Speaker 3: because I stopped questioning whether these were just silly imaginations
Speaker 3: of a child.
Speaker 2: Do you have kids yourself now?
Speaker 3: No, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2: When I watched the documentary, the most immediate visceral thought
Speaker 2: was thinking about what your parents must have felt, because
Speaker 2: when you're a parent, you want to shield your kid
Speaker 2: from everything, right, and like the most horrifying parts of
Speaker 2: this documentary to me were when you were scared or
Speaker 2: children were scared. There's like a rawness to it that
Speaker 2: is really remarkably terrifying to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this became more clear to me not only
Speaker 3: through talking to my mom, but also more recently since
Speaker 3: the war in Gaza started and the more recent like
Speaker 3: Eron Israel war that was happening when on the daily
Speaker 3: we're hearing and feeling missiles being dropped, like Tel Aviv
Speaker 3: is just outside my window, I can see it. I
Speaker 3: grew up feeling maybe deep down that the decision to
Speaker 3: leave Palestine that my parents took was taken without my consent,
Speaker 3: and now I'm back here in Palestine and I'm going
Speaker 3: through that same process of oh do I leave? Do
Speaker 3: I stay? But if I leave, you know, there's the community,
Speaker 3: and there's all of this that we've been building for
Speaker 3: so long, and all of this effort that we've been
Speaker 3: trying to do. And that's exactly the same reasoning that
Speaker 3: my mom was going through. But then on top of that,
Speaker 3: she had kids, all right. So I'm sitting here going
Speaker 3: through my own anxiety in this decision making process, and
Speaker 3: then I remember my mom and I remember, Oh, thank
Speaker 3: god I don't have kids, because this would be hell.
Speaker 3: This would be hell. I can't even begin to imagine
Speaker 3: what it's like. But you know, makes me more grateful
Speaker 3: for the decisions they did make.
Speaker 2: Did you have to take time when you were watching
Speaker 2: the footage? I mean, I'm assuming this is a pretty
Speaker 2: heavy emotional thing to watch, even though you do remember it.
Speaker 2: How did you do it? Did you watch them alone?
Speaker 2: Did you watch them with Maryelle? Did you watch them
Speaker 2: with family?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: I watched them alone. There was about five or six
Speaker 3: hours of footage from the Intafad period, So I sat
Speaker 3: through that took me about three months to go through
Speaker 3: all of it translated and subtitle it, so I watched
Speaker 3: every scene possible more than once in that process. At first,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be able to watch more than an hour
Speaker 3: at a time without stepping outside, taking a breathe there,
Speaker 3: crying a little bit, sometimes smoking a cigarette, grabbing a beer,
Speaker 3: doing what I need to do to get back to it.
Speaker 3: It slowly got easier, and I started seeing more of
Speaker 3: the beauty in what was happening, rather than it still
Speaker 3: validating these early childhood emotions that I have still in me.
Speaker 3: So once I got past that, I'm like, what a
Speaker 3: beautiful family, And despite everything that's happening, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: so lucky that this is me and that's my mom,
Speaker 3: and that's my dad, and that's my sister. And it
Speaker 3: makes me so proud and to see that. Because there's
Speaker 3: a lot of beautiful and funny and wholesome moments, but
Speaker 3: there were some things that soothly killed me on the inside.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, there was that scene in the
Speaker 3: trailer as well, where my mom describes the moment where
Speaker 3: I lost my childhood. She describes me as like a
Speaker 3: face with two empty eyes, like black holes soul. Thessize
Speaker 3: that's how she saw me. Me and my mom during
Speaker 3: my teenage years, we didn't have the best relationship, and
Speaker 3: I went through a really rough period depression and dealing
Speaker 3: with PTSD and things like that. And when I would
Speaker 3: look in the mirror during that time, that's how I
Speaker 3: would see myself. And I never shared that with anybody.
Speaker 3: I would be scared to look at myself in the
Speaker 3: mirror because I would look at myself and I would
Speaker 3: just see two empty black holes as eyes. And then
Speaker 3: the first time hearing my mom described me as a
Speaker 3: child the same way that I saw myself in my
Speaker 3: most vulnerable moment, that killed me. I started crying immediately,
Speaker 3: and I called my mom and I told her.
Speaker 2: I fully believe that the passage from childhood to adulthood
Speaker 2: involves some hardening of the soul or something like that.
Speaker 2: I've heard it described in different ways. It's like you
Speaker 2: stop believing everything that you're told. You lose a vulnerability,
Speaker 2: I guess is the way to put it. And it's
Speaker 2: a remarkable and terrifying moment because I have kids. I
Speaker 2: just kept putting myself in your parents' shoes and thinking like,
Speaker 2: what a horrible thing to experience, which also made me
Speaker 2: curious when you said I've been looking through these and
Speaker 2: I want to make them public. Was your family ever
Speaker 2: like maybe not? Maybe?
Speaker 3: Wait No, my mom at first didn't really believe me.
Speaker 3: And I know this because when we got our first
Speaker 3: grant and I told her, She's like, oh, so this
Speaker 3: is really happening. I'm like, yeah, I've been working on
Speaker 3: this for a year. So at that point I had
Speaker 3: to back down with her and be like, are you
Speaker 3: sure that you're okay with this? And she's like, when
Speaker 3: I was filming it, I hope that one day we
Speaker 3: could share it with the world. And I told her, well,
Speaker 3: I think that day has come. And later on in
Speaker 3: the process, she had some concerns that she might come
Speaker 3: off as a bad mom, that she could have done
Speaker 3: more to pretec all of her insecurities came up. But
Speaker 3: there was a lot of conversations obviously off camera between
Speaker 3: me and my mom about that and me reassuring my
Speaker 3: mom like, you're a superstar, Like you're the best mom
Speaker 3: I could have ever asked for. That, Like, if we
Speaker 3: left earlier, you don't know what would have happened. Then
Speaker 3: if we stayed longer, you don't know what would have happened,
Speaker 3: and we are where we are today because of your decisions.
Speaker 3: Once you started getting love from the audience's, her confidence
Speaker 3: came back.
Speaker 2: I have a logistical question, which is this. You're trained
Speaker 2: in a totally different discipline. You came up in a
Speaker 2: different world. Is there a point when you sat down
Speaker 2: and like, I'm going to teach myself how to make
Speaker 2: a documentary? Did you download software and start to teach
Speaker 2: yourself how to use it? How did you go about
Speaker 2: this process?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly that I download a premiere pro and figured
Speaker 3: it out. I mean, it doesn't take that much to
Speaker 3: do the very basics, right. I knew at some point
Speaker 3: I would have to hire someone that actually knows what
Speaker 3: they're doing to do the final touches. But I can
Speaker 3: slice up scenes and put them in the order that
Speaker 3: I think makes the most sense in terms of story
Speaker 3: and narrative structure and things like that. So for me,
Speaker 3: the vision was keeping get as raw as possible and
Speaker 3: just showing insight into what it's like living in a
Speaker 3: war zone. So I was like, Okay, this is a
Speaker 3: good scene. I could follow it with this scene eventually
Speaker 3: came up with a rough assembly by myself, but then
Speaker 3: after that, our editor took it to the next level.
Speaker 3: I love her for all her patients as well, because
Speaker 3: I went out to New York. She's based in Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: I stayed there for two weeks and we were working daily,
Speaker 3: and you know, she would tell me Jacob and Elka
Speaker 3: and whatever, and I don't know what she's saying on
Speaker 3: teaching me how to do it, teach me how to
Speaker 3: do it. And she had the patients to be like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is what this means, and this is what that means,
Speaker 3: and this is how you do that.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, And did you have touchstones from other documentaries
Speaker 2: that you admired, Were there TV docs or movies they
Speaker 2: were like, this is my tone or this is the
Speaker 2: approach I want to take.
Speaker 3: Five Broken Cameras always came to mind, just it being
Speaker 3: the only other Pelscee film about the second and to Fada,
Speaker 3: as well as for Samma about the Syrian War Civil War.
Speaker 3: For Sama was you know, definitely like a goal for me. Right.
Speaker 2: That's when she's talking to her daughter.
Speaker 3: Right, exactly right. So it's this mom and her husband
Speaker 3: is a doctor in the hospital and the mother is
Speaker 3: filming everything and her husband is one of the last
Speaker 3: to stay when the Russians start bombarding the city and
Speaker 3: they have this baby born during the war, and then
Speaker 3: they immediately leave the country. So her story is written
Speaker 3: like a letter to her daughter explaining why they had
Speaker 3: to leave and why they had to let go of
Speaker 3: their home, and it was so powerful, and to me,
Speaker 3: I was like, I'm in a position here to write
Speaker 3: the follow up to that. I mean years later, when
Speaker 3: Semma isn't a baby, you know, I was twenty six
Speaker 3: when I started working on this. Other than those two
Speaker 3: Nelson Kristen, who both worked on Midnight Traveler and Camera
Speaker 3: Person and other documentaries that kind of have a similar tone,
Speaker 3: we were lucky the s film and the Catapult program
Speaker 3: and then later the Gotham Institute connected us with mentors
Speaker 3: that relate to the aesthetic of our film or the
Speaker 3: message of our film. So I was very lucky to
Speaker 3: have access to those people and get feedback from them
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: At what point do you start needing financial support? So
Speaker 2: you decide you're going to start to do this, You're
Speaker 2: coming through the videos, you start talking to your mom,
Speaker 2: and then at some point you're like, okay, this has
Speaker 2: to become real, and you apply for the was the
Speaker 2: Catapult grant where you started.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was about ten thousand dollars. I mean,
Speaker 3: we used most of that money to set up the business,
Speaker 3: you know, do some of the legal as well as
Speaker 3: do a professional restoration and digitization of the original tapes
Speaker 3: because we wanted to make sure that the audio was
Speaker 3: really good. That ten thousand dollars kept us going. We
Speaker 3: eventually got grant funding from the Arab Fund for Arts
Speaker 3: and Culture, and then we also got in kind services
Speaker 3: from different pitch events. Right, we got one at the
Speaker 3: Malmo Arab Film Festival at that Man International Film Festival
Speaker 3: in Jordan. But we eventually had to do a crowdfunding
Speaker 3: campaign on Seedent's Park and luckily we raised more than
Speaker 3: we expected. That was to pay the editor. She offered
Speaker 3: us half her rate on which she would usually charge.
Speaker 3: Obviously not going to expect someone to work on this
Speaker 3: for free, so we had to raise money to pay
Speaker 3: for that because she was working on it for two
Speaker 3: three months editing, and it's not cheap. Editors are not cheap,
Speaker 3: especially editors in the US.
Speaker 2: And you're working at the same time. I'm assuming you
Speaker 2: and Mary all are both have day jobs. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: so would you do this at night?
Speaker 3: I worked out with a time difference, right because my
Speaker 3: team was all in New York. So come seven pm
Speaker 3: my time, they're working on things. I'm following up with
Speaker 3: them on what's happened on email. And we had a
Speaker 3: weekly calls to catch up on everything, and then me
Speaker 3: and Mattot would She would send over like clips or
Speaker 3: things that she's edited, and you know, I'd give her feedback.
Speaker 3: But eventually got to the stage where like, okay, for
Speaker 3: us to get to the finish line, yusef and note
Speaker 3: need to sit down together there and do it. So
Speaker 3: I took two weeks off work and flew out to
Speaker 3: New York and just spent it looking over her shoulders.
Speaker 2: So this is your first time making a film like that?
Speaker 2: In your head, if you were wound to the time
Speaker 2: when you have had those two weeks in New York,
Speaker 2: what was the finish line in your head? How did
Speaker 2: you envision it?
Speaker 3: At that time? We had approximately an eighty five minute film,
Speaker 3: and I never really gave myself a time limit, but
Speaker 3: I knew it was too long. My goal was I
Speaker 3: need at least fifteen minutes gone. There are scenes that
Speaker 3: are boring and I don't know why or where, but
Speaker 3: I am getting bored. I don't want anyone to get bored.
Speaker 3: I want people to leave wanting more. I wanted people
Speaker 3: to finish the film and have to breathe. You know,
Speaker 3: are you're watching the credits and you use that time
Speaker 3: to just like zone out and breathe. That's the feeling
Speaker 3: that I wanted. And she worked her magic. She brought
Speaker 3: it down to seventy five and then and fifty five minutes.
Speaker 3: She was pushing for the fifty five. I was pushing
Speaker 3: for the seventy five. We landed on the sixty one minute,
Speaker 3: mostly because for film festivals we needed to be sixty
Speaker 3: minutes to be considered a feature.
Speaker 2: It can't be under an The forty to.
Speaker 3: Sixty minute range is nonexistent in film festivals. If you're
Speaker 3: over forty, you're too long for a short, and if
Speaker 3: you're under sixty, you're too short for a feature, so
Speaker 3: you get lost.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Origin Stories. Today, we're talking to Yusaf
Speaker 2: Shrewzy about his documentary Three Promises. I want you to
Speaker 2: tell me a little bit about the distribution strategy. So
Speaker 2: you make the film, at what point do you start
Speaker 2: thinking about Okay, I've made this thing. I'm making this
Speaker 2: thing that I love. Now I'm going to need people
Speaker 2: to hear it. At what point in the process do
Speaker 2: you start thinking about who's going to distribute it.
Speaker 3: It was the Gotham Institute. We had a fellowship with them,
Speaker 3: so they had a week long program that was dedicated
Speaker 3: to distribution and sales for first time filmmakers. Was perfect.
Speaker 3: I didn't even know the levels of bureaucracy and confusion.
Speaker 3: I just thought you could just get an agent and
Speaker 3: they'll sell it for you. I'm not proud to say this,
Speaker 3: but I am happy to say that I dumped that
Speaker 3: on Maryelle. I'm like, hey, you're the producer. I have
Speaker 3: no idea what's going on here. Because when we first
Speaker 3: started working on it, she asked me, what do you
Speaker 3: want to do with this. I'm like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: just put on YouTube. And she's like, no, you're not
Speaker 3: going to do that. So she started applying to the
Speaker 3: grants and to the festivals, and we won't take into distribution.
Speaker 3: You know. She was already plugged into the network. So
Speaker 3: she had some names that she thought would like this film,
Speaker 3: and we were reaching out. We got a lot of Oh,
Speaker 3: this is a beautiful movie, but we're not going to
Speaker 3: take it. In North America. No one was touching our film.
Speaker 3: We got a lot of great feedback from all the
Speaker 3: big names, small names, independent names, but no one wanted
Speaker 3: to sell it. In the Middle East. We early on
Speaker 3: got a distribution deal from friends that we met through
Speaker 3: the Man International Film Festival and the Melmo Arab from Festival,
Speaker 3: and they were supported from the beginning. So I trusted
Speaker 3: them that they'll do their best, and they did. They
Speaker 3: put it up on the largest local streaming platform, and
Speaker 3: now Watermelon Pictures has done the same for us in
Speaker 3: North America. Thank god.
Speaker 2: Well, let's address the elephant in the room, which is
Speaker 2: that the people were nervous probably distributing a movie that
Speaker 2: touches on the Middle East conflict in any way. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a third rail.
Speaker 3: I completely understand that. I just worked so hard on
Speaker 3: making this film apolitical. We don't talk about why the
Speaker 3: NDI thought is happening. We don't mention Israel in depth.
Speaker 3: There are no normative statements happening about the occupation. You're
Speaker 3: simply living with a family going through a war zone,
Speaker 3: and it's like even that you're Scared to Touch were
Speaker 3: released in March twenty twenty three and Warren Gaza started
Speaker 3: and it started getting a lot more interest from festivals
Speaker 3: all over the world. Listen, maybe my film's not that good, fine, right,
Speaker 3: but no other land just want an Oscar and they
Speaker 3: don't have a distribution company. That's insane.
Speaker 2: It depresses me the way that this topic, in any
Speaker 2: form of journalism people worry about touching it in any way.
Speaker 2: The preconceptions, the loadedness of it scares people, and I
Speaker 2: understand why. But it also this makes me, from a
Speaker 2: journalist's perspective, that there's stories that are probably going unheard
Speaker 2: or untold or undistributed because of people's fear. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean to your point, I would never say this
Speaker 2: is a political movie. It's a movie about a family
Speaker 2: and what life is really like in these situations, which
Speaker 2: to me again is the most astonishing part of it.
Speaker 2: We're so used to be bombarded with images of the
Speaker 2: worst atrocities that one can imagine on social media, and
Speaker 2: for me, one effect is that it flattens my thinking
Speaker 2: about what's happening in Palestine to pure destruction, which, of
Speaker 2: course on one level it is, but there's also a
Speaker 2: fact in which life does have to carry on. People
Speaker 2: still have to exist in some way, and we never
Speaker 2: get to see that those aren't the images that we see.
Speaker 2: And that's what I found so moving about it. Families
Speaker 2: still have to exist, they have to move around, and
Speaker 2: they have to be families.
Speaker 3: Agree, And I think as important as it is that
Speaker 3: these images that we're seeing that are coming out of
Speaker 3: these places, because I do think that with the over
Speaker 3: influx of photos and videos that are coming out of
Speaker 3: places like us, and the limitations or the fears that
Speaker 3: we were just speaking about in journalism circles and documentary
Speaker 3: circles and film circles is slowly dwindling because at some
Speaker 3: point you have to face the elephant in the room,
Speaker 3: right like when the elephant is that big. But it
Speaker 3: does kind of desensitize us a little bit and makes
Speaker 3: it hard to continue watching because it's not even possible
Speaker 3: to process five second clip of someone picking up pieces
Speaker 3: of their baby. I'm sorry, but I know this from
Speaker 3: deep within my heart that the film's coming out of
Speaker 3: the Gazen people, where whatever their future looks like in
Speaker 3: the next five ten years are going to be a
Speaker 3: killing And I really hope that by then the world
Speaker 3: is ready to watch them and to support them and
Speaker 3: to distribute them.
Speaker 2: I suspect they will. What I I hope that people
Speaker 2: would get out of a movie like yours is you know,
Speaker 2: you can understand through one family's experience, and it doesn't
Speaker 2: have to be like a pure catastrophe. It doesn't have
Speaker 2: to be the kind of images that we get bombarded
Speaker 2: with on TV. Now you can feel how the enormity
Speaker 2: of a conflict in a much more subtle way, which
Speaker 2: is what makes the movie so successful.
Speaker 3: To me, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: I want to ask you a little bit about the
Speaker 2: film festival's circuit and the kind of reactions you've got.
Speaker 2: You were all over the world, right, you probably don't know,
Speaker 2: but how many festivals and screenings do you think you had?
Speaker 3: More than I could count and in countries all over
Speaker 3: the world. I mean, the one that was a smack
Speaker 3: to the face was the DMZ Film Festival between North
Speaker 3: Korea and South Korea. There's a city there on the
Speaker 3: border and my film was playing there, And how the
Speaker 3: did my film get all the way there?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I've been so grateful for the film of
Speaker 3: all life that my film had.
Speaker 2: Had Did people see the movie and the way that
Speaker 2: you thought they would see the movie? In other words,
Speaker 2: this is so personal and you have so much wrapped
Speaker 2: up in it, and you created it. When people were
Speaker 2: watching it and asking you questions or commenting on it,
Speaker 2: were there surprises and how they saw it? Or was
Speaker 2: it what you expected?
Speaker 3: The surprises came when I noticed people were seeing beyond
Speaker 3: basic questions. The usuals are how I came to make
Speaker 3: this film and how I felt making the film, why
Speaker 3: my mom was filming in questions about my mom, and
Speaker 3: then my sister is freaking out the most, how is she?
Speaker 3: When I got questions that where people saw beyond that
Speaker 3: was where I really felt like, oh wow, I don't
Speaker 3: know who you are. You live in a country halfway
Speaker 3: across the world, and you're seeing that which I intended
Speaker 3: for people to see. Little things about my dad, for example,
Speaker 3: like my dad reading Harry Potter to us and kind
Speaker 3: of his role and most people don't catch that right,
Speaker 3: but few fathers out there did because they were paying
Speaker 3: closer attention to what my dad was doing. But what
Speaker 3: surprised me the most was I did not receive a
Speaker 3: single negative comment or any type of passive, aggressive or
Speaker 3: anything that was just pure love and support, especially in
Speaker 3: North America. A True False Film festival was where it
Speaker 3: really hit me. It's like a college town, like an
Speaker 3: hour's drive from Saint Louis, I mean, Jesus country, right
Speaker 3: like Billboard's saying, Jesus will save you and call this
Speaker 3: number and Jesus will answer, and you know the Trump flags.
Speaker 3: Not only did everyone there know who I was, which
Speaker 3: felt really weird because it was a very small, intimate festival,
Speaker 3: but they were all so supportive, and all these old
Speaker 3: white Americans who were like locals from Missouri coming and
Speaker 3: having in depth conversations with me about it and clearly
Speaker 3: very propousity, various empathetic to me. That was mind chattering.
Speaker 3: They did have a security detail for me at that
Speaker 3: festival because they were getting some threats, but if they
Speaker 3: hadn't told me, I wouldn't have noticed.
Speaker 2: You've made a massively successful documentary. You're back in Palestine.
Speaker 2: Are you making something now? Are you working on a
Speaker 2: new documentary or was this a one thing you just
Speaker 2: wanted to try it and now you're going to go
Speaker 2: back to your day job.
Speaker 3: I've been focusing on my day job since we released
Speaker 3: the film more than anything, and I don't think it's
Speaker 3: the end of my storytelling career. I don't know how
Speaker 3: I feel about filmmaking again. I'm definitely open to using
Speaker 3: that medium. I have more stories to tell. I have
Speaker 3: my grandparents' stories to tell as well that they've archived
Speaker 3: and they've written in places, and I'd love to find
Speaker 3: ways to share them in the future. But I don't
Speaker 3: like to depend on the creative process for my income.
Speaker 3: Let's put it that way. When it becomes a need
Speaker 3: for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.
Speaker 3: And I feel that way about everything really. But the
Speaker 3: last few years I've been focusing on the startup here
Speaker 3: of a consulting company and a nonprofit like think tank.
Speaker 3: Me and my partner is locally. A lot of work
Speaker 3: has been putting into that. You know, we're really trying
Speaker 3: to give back to the community and to build a
Speaker 3: progressive base for Palestinian news, to empower them and hopefully
Speaker 3: see change in the future. But with the current situation,
Speaker 3: it's hard to tell what tomorrow holds. I know for
Speaker 3: a fact I'll be back to storytelling, though sooner or later.
Speaker 2: Yes, do you think of three promises as a political movie.
Speaker 3: Not at all. Like I said, it's a film about
Speaker 3: a family living in a war zone, and it just
Speaker 3: so happens to be a Palestinian family living in Palestine
Speaker 3: under Israeli occupation. That's facts, it's not politics.
Speaker 2: I asked, because I am so curious about the fate
Speaker 2: of storytelling that feels at all political in this day
Speaker 2: and age. So a little bit of what I was
Speaker 2: talking about earlier, where anything that even touches on something
Speaker 2: that can say that are third rail gets judged before
Speaker 2: it comes out. This is true not just of the
Speaker 2: conflict in Palestine. It's true of American politics when it
Speaker 2: comes to Trump with domestic terrorism. You know, it's like
Speaker 2: there's certain topics that are very hard to reach people with.
Speaker 2: You can make it, but will people actually consume it.
Speaker 2: So I wonder if you have suggestions or thoughts when
Speaker 2: somebody is telling a story like the one that you did,
Speaker 2: that some people are going to view one way or
Speaker 2: another as political, how do you get them to still
Speaker 2: pay attention.
Speaker 3: Keep it row if it's coming from a place where
Speaker 3: you're not virtue signaling, You're just like, this is how
Speaker 3: it is. It's from an emotional place. It is from
Speaker 3: the deepest places in my heart. Looked at this film
Speaker 3: from a pure, innocent child's perspective. Don't add anything. There's
Speaker 3: no need to send signals that occupation is bad, or
Speaker 3: that Israel is mean, or that Palestinians have the right
Speaker 3: to resist or whatever. This is simply a story of
Speaker 3: humans living in a human created problem and they're dealing
Speaker 3: with it, and the world needs to see it for
Speaker 3: what it is. Let the audience decide what their politics are.
Speaker 3: If they see your film and become more extremist, then
Speaker 3: it's probably a problem with them, and no matter what
Speaker 3: messaging you put into your film, that's not going to
Speaker 3: change their thoughts. I think the most powerful thing we
Speaker 3: have as humans is our ability to share our emotions
Speaker 3: with each other, and that's what makes us social animals,
Speaker 3: and so it makes us who we are.
Speaker 2: So ironic about that is that when you do let
Speaker 2: people decide, the effect is often more emotionally strong, like
Speaker 2: you're able to reach more people if you don't try
Speaker 2: to make up their minds for them.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a truly beautiful film. I hope you are so
Speaker 2: proud about it, and you said thank you so much
Speaker 2: for doing this.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Matt, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Three Promises is now available to stream in North America.
Speaker 2: You can find out on Apple TV in Prime Video
Speaker 2: by searching three Promises. Origin Stories is a production of
Speaker 2: Campside Media, hosted by me Matthew Cher and produced by
Speaker 2: abacar Adn. This episode was sound designed by Garrett Tiedeman,
Speaker 2: theme music by Doug Slawan. Our studio engineer is Jimmy
Speaker 2: Guthrie at Arcade one sixty Studios. Special thanks to Michael
Speaker 2: Kenyon Mayer at Campside and Chris McLeod at Blue Elevator
Speaker 2: Productions