Stripped of dignity

In her debut as director, Farah Nabulsi has not only made a name for herself with her fourth semi-documentary film, “The Present,”  but also has broken through the thick wall of silence surrounding Israel’s occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank. This makes “The Present,” just 24 minutes long, revolutionary as it not only won a Bafta but was also nominated for an Oscar.

 Unlike most winning films, “The Present” was made in a few days on a low-budget, using minimal cast and crew, and shot at real locations. She also had to adopt guerrilla tactics because her company had no permits for filming from the Israeli authorities for which Nabulsi refused to apply.

Permission probably would have been rejected if she had.

 “The Present” tells the story of a Palestinian manual labourer, Yusef, who leaves home in the Bethlehem area with his young daughter, Yasmin, to buy his wife a refrigerator as a wedding anniversary present. They are funnelled through a checkpoint where, before Yasmin’s eyes, her beloved father is bullied, stripped of dignity, and rendered powerless to stand up to the armed Israelis while carrying out a simple but would be happy mission.

 The film opens at checkpoint 300, filmed on site, where West Bank workers, including Yusef, seek entry to Israel and other West Bank enclaves early every morning. Beginning in the dark at three o’clock, hundreds of men are crammed for several hours into a long, narrow barred cage alongside Israel’s grey cement slab wall and repeatedly subjected to humiliation by Israeli soldiers.

 It is ironic that the winner of this year’s Oscar for short films was “Two Distant Strangers,” is about how Black men are brutalised in the US. This film was the first in the short action category to be won by a Black co-director, Travon Free, whose co-winner was white. British-US dual national Martin Desmond Roe. The film is about a Black man trying to get home from his girlfriend’s flat to look after his dog. The man repeatedly relives in dreams fatal encounters with a white cop. In the first scenario the Black man is accosted by the cop after accidentally bumping into a white man carrying a cup of coffee. The Black man is thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and his head is slammed to the pavement and killed. This, of course, invokes the treatment meted out to George Floyd whose trial resulted in the murder conviction of former policeman Derek Chauvin.

 Due to this timely connection, “The Present,” which is about the mirror situation experienced by Palestinians, was never going to win. After all, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a US outfit and US-made films have, for a century, portrayed Arabs as criminals and evil-doers.

 With “The Present,” however, Nabulsi has broken this mould and could, perhaps, return as a nominee for her upcoming film in the category of foreign feature. Speaking to al-Jazeera, she describbed it as “a character-driven drama-thriller about loss and self-absolution and parenthood, set in the geopolitical landscape of Palestine.” Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, who starred as Yusef in “The Present,” is to play the lead.

 Born in London to Palestinian parents, Nabulsi was raised as both British and Palestinian.She and her sister had weekly tutoring in Arabic and visited Palestine regularly until the First Intifada erupted in 1987. Always apolitical at home, her parents sought to avoid inflicting the trauma they felt over events in their homeland on Nabulsi and her sister.

 Nabulsi told al-Jazeera that her visits to Palestine “laid certain seeds — politically, no — but it laid certain attachments, certain connections to the people, the land, to friends we made, to our ancestral home, quite literally. I remember my grandfather’s house and the courtyard where we’d tell stories around a fire, and my aunt would squeeze fresh lemonade. So I have that, I did have that, and I think that did lay seeds.” 

 Although she did not return to Palestine for 25 years, these early visits sowed the seeds of activism through filmmaking. All that was needed for the seed to sprout and the plant to flower was a visit to Palestine. In 2013, against her parents wishes, she returned and was transformed by the conditions her people encounter: 100 West Bank checkpoints, Israel’s wall that dominates the landscape, roads for Israelis only, colonies taking over hilltops, Palestinian home demolitions, and detentions of children. One-by-one, Nabulsi seeks to record these aspects of the occupation.  

 A film buff since she was a youth, Nabulsi had a high flying career in stockbroking and corporate banking in London before she established her own film production company with the aim of making films to depict the Palestinian experience under occupation. During an interview with Vogue magazine, she said she was happy in the business world before making the shift. Asked why she made such a dramatic change in her life, she replied, simply, “I went home.”

 In contrast with the harsh realism of “The Present,” her three first efforts were poetic and impressionistic. “The Oceans of Injustice” is an appeal to the world to recognise that Palestinians are drowning in the rough sea of occupation; “The Nightmare of Gaza” is an audio presentation of Israel’s 2014 war on the Strip; and “Today They Took My Son” is about a young mother’s grief and fear when the Israeli military arrests her 10 year-old who threw stones at soldiers during a home demolition. As a wife and mother of three teenage boys, Nabulsi has clearly felt the loss and agony of this film character. These three very short films were launched by the Council for Arab British Understanding in May 2017 after the 69th anniversary of the Naqba, the catastrophe which drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, and ahead of the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

 The Bafta award and the Oscar nomination have spurred her to carry on even though she has not been to film school or worked her way up the ladder to director or producer. Al-Jazeera quoted her as saying, “I’ve got the bug and I’m forging ahead where it feels very right.” So far, she has made surprising strides forward. It will be illuminating to see her feature film and how it is received.