Tourist With A Blogwriter

Bridges, Mountains

2012-01-20T01:55:00.000Z

Walk across the Bruvegen Bridge, over the Norwegian Sea. To the north, you can see the sun for the few hours in the day that it is above the horizon. There is no "day" here, only a glimpse of the sun. To the south, frozen mountains.

Below you, ships are waiting to be repaired in the freezing water. The water is crystal clear. I remember diving in while in Svalbard. My hands froze in pain and then numbness in three and a half minutes.

A video loop in the Arctic Museum reminds us that there are no wild Polar Bears in mainland northern Norway. The beautiful project "Nanoq: Flat Out And Bluesome" hunted and documented all the stuffed Polar Bears in the UK.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe the ships in the museum actually made it to the Arctic. They look too small:

We spend our day in workshops, deconstructing and reconstructing our poor, struggling, starving film ideas. I tried to set my film in 2044, it didn't work. I still like the idea of "a documentary shot in the future" We hear about Visionary Violence and Norway's solitary, mesmerising space odyssey.

Is this city in status during winter months? I can no longer follow day and night, only looking at my watch tells me where I am and what I should be doing (eating? Sleeping? Waking up? Feeling tired?)

Tromso Black Ice

2012-01-18T01:14:00.000Z

Tromso is the northernmost film festival in the world. It has a lot of superlatives. Most wooden houses in Norway. Highest suicide rate in the world. Northernmost city in the world. Northernmost mosque in the world. Northernmost university in the world. If you build something significant here, chances are it will be the northernmost of that thing in the world.

But I have beaten Tromso at its own game. I have used the world's northernmost ATM and it's not in Tromso.

Never mind. The Tromso International Film Festival is on.

Mar and I are here to pitch There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void. It is a semi-fictional, science fiction documentary - an ecological film for the 21st century, part expedition document, part meditation on mankind's relationship to nature, part surreal art experiment, part love-letter to the Arctic, part impressionistic examination of loss.

It features several of my good friends and radical thinkers. It features the incredible landscape of the Norwegian Arctic. It features a stuffed Polar Bear and a silver inflatable whale.

Tromso is an island, so don't think of using the water as a navigation tool, it will only confuse you. There is invisible black ice on the roads, but despite rumours it isn't that cold. The cheapest meal costs £15.00

Herzog's Into The Abyss plays at 11pm. It is simple, messy, beautiful and tragic. He never cares about aesthetics. He is more removed here than in other films. He is quieter and more respectful. Burkett's father is heartbreaking, and perhaps the most honest person in the film. The cinema seats are very comfortable:

Tomorrow, there might be a boat museum that we need to visit in the city before more screenings and the first meeting with the rest of the Below Zero group. Norway loves its boat museums.

This image wasn't taken in Norway, but I liked it so I've included it here:

Edges Are Sharp, Edges Are Blurred (Arctic journal #8)

2011-11-01T01:46:00.001Z

Oct 2, 2011
Carry the water. It pools at the back of the Zodiac, tilting back into the sea. At the surface of the water, the air is freezing. Scrape the bottom of the boat, landing on a gravel shore. It is warmer here - some hills of snow, ground spill gently into a bay of still water. Snow melts into gravel and mud beaches. Algae coral look like flakes of cereal, grain on the beach.

We are meerkats popping our heads up and down over the snow hills, looking for our own spaces to work, or stare, or record, or perform. I stand, listening, still into the wind. I hear cracking and rumbling of thunder, detonations. The ice is active, falling into the sea, tearing itself apart. The earth splitting.
There are only two colours here: black and white. They blend into grey. The haze moves in and out. Sometimes the far ridge is clear and close, other times it is hidden behind the fog with undefined edges, in contrast to the sharpness of the cold. All edges are sharp on my skin in this dry cold, but all edges are blurred in the landscape. (in the snow, there are no sharp edges).

Landscape itself does little for me unless I can activate it. (Sophia says "humans are psychologically programmed to be most interesting in faces.") I need to build up heat under these layers.
"Are you going to run?"
I need to provoke it, seduce it, antagonise it, threaten it with diminution. We have guns, we are already antagonising it. We are looking for white on white (hollow fibres that refract light to look white).
Marcelo searches, tags, categorises, measures, photographs the objects he tags. To identify and locate.

ARCTIC 109: the sound of deep wind and ice crystals hitting the microphone
ARCTIC 113: standing still on a hill, looking over the bay, Paul motionless.
ARCTIC 111: Walking slowly towards Jessica, from blurry to in focus. She is photographing.
ARCTIC 139: Marcelo asleep, silhouetted by the porthole. Engine, water gurgling, deep breathing.
ARCTIC 116: Michelle, ship in the distance, her gun, her boots, her face. She's looking in the distance for Polar Bears.

These artists are numerous aspects of the same person. How does each approach the environment? How does each interpret this event? These circumstances?
(Jessica, mourning, in a jacket and veil, collecting light with solar panels. Will she encounter Paul's fossil fuel plant?)

ARCTIC 106: Boots walking in snow: clear sound, crisp.

The Clarity Of Distant Mountains

2011-10-01T02:28:00.000+01:00

The clarity of distant mountains is unbelievable. You could wrap your fingers around them. They are too clear. They look too close, I understand how early Arctic explorers made the fatal mistake of sailing for a distant landscape, thinking it was only a few miles away.

Svalbard: "I heard nobody dies here, nobody is born here."

We sail into snow, the light gets bluer, dimmer, bluer. Snow falls thicker, it cracks in the air, chrysalises. Breaks as you walk through it. Look outside the boat, and you see only blackness. At the same time, the snow makes you feel cocooned. One pushes you away, the other pulls you in. Land approaches, but as soon as the outline of the landscape appears, thick fog falls.

"Have you ever been on a boat out of sight of land?"

I think of fishing with my father, killing the fish that he didn't have the stomach to kill. He doesn't like the sight of blood. I think of my mother almost drowning as a child - she never liked water after that point, but still she sat on the fishing boat with a wide sun hat. I think of falling in the water - no one would find you, you would have only four minutes to live.

Philip walks out of the wheelhouse and kicks a lever at the ship's bow. The anchor plunges to the ocean floor. Bram sweeps snow from the deck, silhouetted against the lights of the wheel house. He is smoking a cigarette and the smoke mixes with the condensation of his breath.

Layers keep me warm, but my fingers burn with numbness. My circulation ends here. We are floating into oblivion. Fog so thick and close we can't see more than ten metres from the boat. Victorian explorers look out into fog like this and pray to god they don't hit an iceberg. They congratulate themselves on proving a new island, they name it. It is theirs. They wish they could see a vista and admire it but the fog is too thick.

Everything is edgeless, corners are no longer sharp. The deck is no longer as hard. The snow renders everything indeterminate. The chair on deck is from a summer patio - but the tourists are missing. They were here in the summer, but now the plastic summer tables and chairs are covered in snow.

Dan records a conversation with the water. I can only hear him mumbling into his microphone, an intimate dialogue.

Position at 0800: 78°40' N 14°42' E
Temperature: 1 °C – overcast – no wind

Last Night On Land

2011-09-30T21:37:00.001+01:00

The final modifications are made to my equipment: testing the camera, the camera rig, the film, streamlining my bag so I can move easily but have everything I need with me at all times.

Our ship pulls into the harbour, and we can see the sails towering over the low buildings around it. We aren't allowed to visit the ship yet - she's like a bride before a wedding. But some of us climb the hill behind the harbour and look down on it.

The clarity of distant mountains is unimaginable. They look hyperreal. You can see every rock, every crack, every piece of ice, all details in such sharpness you could close your fingers around them. But they're miles away.

I buy last-minute supplies:
Cling film: one roll
Chocolate: four different formats
Bitter strawberry gelatine sweets: quarter kilo
Jameson Whisky: half-bottle

Tomorrow we set sail. No telephone, no internet for two weeks.
You will read everything I have to say on my return, please be patient.

I pass a graveyard while on my run, a dozen uniform white crosses scattered across the rock slope:

I believe in ice

I believe in memories

I believe you didn't mean it

I believe you wanted to explain everything, but never found the time.

Remember, kids: running with tears in your eyes makes it hard to breathe. And zero degrees is not cold enough to freeze them.

First Snowfall...

2011-09-29T22:22:00.000+01:00

In Svalbard Museum, a stuffed Polar Bear crouches ready to attack.

I'm still only wearing two layers - trying to resist the third until it gets really cold. So far, Longyearbeyen has only reached zero degrees.

A freezing fog falls over the town, and every sound is muffled. I walk with Ben and Wyn-Lyn as far as we can see, past the school, in the direction of an art gallery we've heard is perched at the edge of town. But the fog is too thick, we can't see far enough ahead to know where we're heading. The fog spills into the valley, and reminds me of Heart of Glass.

I run 7 miles, down to the Eastern edge of town, as far as I can go before the "Polar Bear Warning" sign that marks the town limits. You should go no further without a gun. I run past a Husky kennel - all the dogs are standing on top of their dog houses, looking around to see where the sound of running is coming from. Their heads flit curiously from side to side, scanning the horizon. One dog sees me and starts barking, and all the others join in.

At around mile three, a light snow starts falling. It sails horizontally, slowly collecting on my eyebrows, in my hair and in the folds of my shirt. It hits my eyeballs and melts instantly, blurring my eyesight for a moment.

The rest of the team arrives on the daily flight from Oslo. We all shake hands like the first day of university. Tomorrow is our last day in town before we set sail.

It Gets Colder

2011-09-28T22:31:00.000+01:00

Coming in to land in Tromso, the air is so clear everything looks pin-sharp, the ridges of the mountains below so clear, even from 15,000 feet, that it looks more like a projection than the surface of the earth getting closer. We have to get off the plane at Tromso, walk through immigration, and walk back onto the same plane for the second leg of the flight to Longyearbeyen.

There is a greyness to the town of Longyearbeyen. It has no pretense to anything other than a depot into the Arctic. Pipelines run above ground into the centre of town. When I ask the receptionist at the lodge where I can find food, she says "just follow the pipeline." The mountains around us and the fog falling calmly over the water insinuate the landscape you would expect of the Arctic, but in this town it's only 4x4s, corrugated metal hangars and heavy machinery. This is where things (and people) come in and go out, nothing more. It's a town only to serve the transportation of supplies. Look out over the water and you can see vast whiteness ahead, ice and mountains. But not here. The hills that surround the town are all cut across by a road, a pipeline, an electricity pylon. This place is about functionality.

The sun never rises here, it only skims above the horizon, no more than 45 degrees. It doesn't rise in the East and set in the West. It doesn't go up and down, signalling morning, noon and night. It doesn't do what you expect. It hangs there, just above the mountains that peak over the town. The sky is covered in a translucent gauze through which the sun has trouble breaking.

Few people go outside. I walk around town to explore, but I rarely see anyone else on foot. A woman is walking her dog - a husky, of course. I run a two-mile loop around town three times. Dressed in thermal underwear and running shoes, I try to get the right balance between sweating and freezing, and after around two miles I reach an equilibrium: heat in, cold out. I feel like a well-balanced, efficient machine. I think I look like a biathlete. But I probably look more like someone running outside in zero degrees in my underwear.

More of the team arrives from Canada, Singapore, London. We walk down to the sailing centre to arrange for my dry suit, and at the edge of the water, two sounds are mixing: the waves repeatedly stroking the shore and the hum of the factory churning out electricity for the town.

At night, I run outside in a t-shirt and trainers when Aaron says he can see the Northern Lights. Two ribbons across the sky, they elegantly loop into each other and flare around the edges. They move faster than I was expecting. Each flare falls slowly to earth; they look like curtains of powdered sugar.

Secrets Of The Museum

2011-09-27T00:13:00.000+01:00

The ferry to Bygdoy leaves from the quays at the south end of Oslo, just below City Hall. It's a water taxi, sailing through the gray mist of the bay. A few drops of rain fell earlier today. I'm packed for snow and freezing wind, but not for rain. (The upcoming weather doesn't look like rain...)

I film on the ferry with the F3, and a Nikon prime 35mm lens. I am enamoured with this camera already. I want to go back in time and re-shoot all my old films with it. Return to the slow, deliberate style of fixed lenses.

I've only met Karina once before, never met her husband Nils, but as I step off the ferry at Bygdoy island they greet me like old friends. Nils has offered to show me around Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Museum, because Nils was - not so long ago - a marine archaeologist. (Is there a more adventurous kind of archaeologist?) But before the Kon-Tiki, Nils has a surprise for me.

He walks with me through the vaults of the Maritime Museum. The shelves of material not on display, unidentified. Some pieces are of unknown origin - shards that can't be put together. Some pieces just don't have enough resources or money behind them to reconstruct. In one corner is an entire ship, laid out in indistinct strips of wood like a drying carcass. "Imagine trying to put that back together..." Karina laughs. I remember that my mother was an archaeologist, and once had the patience to sit for weeks piecing together clay jars from hundreds of tiny fragments.

There is a pile of bones. Broken pipes. Bottles, shoes, dozens of shoes. Nils jumps excitedly from shelf to shelf, recounting fragments of history and anecdotes as they spring to mind. He opens a box with pieces that he found, cleaned and categorised in the early 1990's. They're still in good condition, "It's good to know my work has survived."

There is a team of archaeologists here, wading in waterproof boots through a huge vat of polyethylene glycol. It smells like darkroom photo fixer. The vat held the longest canoe made from a single piece of wood ever found in Norway, and the team is soaking the wood to preserve it. It looks like an oil slick, fragments of flotsam floating on the thick surface.

Nils and Karina drive us up to Frognerseteren, a Dragon hut at the top of Oslo's ski slopes. We peer over the edge at the city's newest ski jump, an angle so steep it scares me just standing here. I imagine the open mouth of Herzog's ecstatic woodcarver Steiner. We look out over the view of the city, now glowing gold with the sunset. Nils remembers his childhood spent up here, drinking hot chocolate after a day's skiing, dancing drunk on the tables after the school prom. Karina and I lament the exploitative, abusive and ruthless industry that television "entertainment" has become. I promise to bring them back pictures from the far north.

On tonight's six-mile run through the city, I have to remind myself this is the warmest I'll be for the next 19 days.

To Oslo...

2011-09-24T22:39:00.000+01:00

Idrees was my taxi driver to the airport. I tried carrying my luggage onto the train, but my gear weighed 25kg, my backpack around another 10kg. Just walking to the train station from my flat was a challenge.

(North Face, you make a great expedition bag, but carrying it on your back is too painful to be practical...please redesign the straps. I'm happy to help...)

Half-way to the train station, I ducked into a side street and asked Sam's Cars to take me to Terminal 5. Idrees walked me to his car. I was so tired after only 4 hours of sleep the night before, I was ready to fall asleep immediately. I always fall asleep in cars. But Idrees' conversation was too involved to fall asleep to.

He told me about how hard he works, sometimes doing two ten-hour shifts back to back. He doesn't take any chances when he gets tired, though. He doesn't do any of the tricks some people do - opening the window to get some air or drinking a cup of coffee. He just goes straight home to sleep. "I'm not going to risk my life for ten, twenty quid," he says.

He tells me about his boxing career. 30 wins in 40 bouts. Most of his losses were because he couldn't get his weight down enough to fall into lightweight - 60kg. He talks me through some of his losses, recounting exactly what it was that finally knocked him down. He says he likes boxing, but who wants to get beaten up all the time?

He has a child on the way - his wife should be giving birth in about two weeks. Idrees would like a boy. He'd like to teach him boxing, but he's not sure it's the right thing to do, teaching a child to beat people up. Sport is great, but maybe not boxing. He took his nephew to a fight once, but he felt bad when he got knocked out - he kept thinking "why should my nephew have to see me like this?"

We talked about the price of baby clothes, and all the accessories you need. He bought a pram for £400. "You could get one for less, but then it'll look cheap. You don't want to be walking around pushing a pram you're not happy with."

"You're Palestinian? Were you at the demo on Saturday?"
I don't really go to demos any more.
He lifts up his sunglasses and shows me a scar.
"That's from a riot shield. People started pushing, and the riot police just beat up anyone they could get their hands on. I had to get 12 stitches and my eye was black and swollen for two weeks. They didn't care who it was. There was a woman next to me, you could see she wouldn't hurt anyone, but they beat her up, too."

As I pay for the taxi, Idrees gives me his card, so I can book a taxi on the way back.
"Good luck with the baby!" I shake his hand as I heave my bags into the airport.
My bag is 2kg over the limit, but the woman at the checkout counter lets it slide. I wouldn't know what to do if she'd stopped me. I would have had to try boarding the plane with my snow boots, weighing 2kg each.

I call my sister to say goodbye. The call reminds me that my airport protocol has changed. I would always call my mother last thing before boarding a flight. She would say something about missing me, never quite sure where I was going or why. I would say something about seeing her soon, never entirely true.

I fall asleep taxing out of Heathrow. I wake up in Oslo. I was so tired I didn't even notice take-off.

How Will I Know When It's Cold Enough?

2011-09-20T16:14:00.004+01:00

Day four of my cold shower routine. I'm preparing for the Arctic swim. I'm now comfortable standing under the shower for five minutes - I could do longer, but frankly it's rather boring standing under a shower once you're actually done showering, just counting every second for five minutes. After around 45 seconds I achieve a zen state where the cold no longer makes me shiver. At times it actually feels comfortable, sometimes even warm. You being to see how small changes in your position, movement and posture make big differences in your ability to retain heat.

Once I reach a comfortable equilibrium, I move slightly, let the water run over my head and suddenly the shivers are back and I have to start again. Breathing slowly and deliberately to find a calm, relaxed state.

On Thursday I'll be going for a cold swim in the UK's largest outdoor fresh-water pool.

In the Arctic, I'll be diving in a dry suit. I admire Lewis in his commitment:

There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void

2011-09-02T15:31:00.003+01:00

This is my love-letter to the Arctic. From September 29 to October 16, I will sail around Norway's Arctic Svalbard Archipelago with The Arctic Circle "nomadic" residency.

There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void is an experimental, "psycho-ecological" project: part expedition documentary, part exploration of mankind's relationship with nature.

The film is being Produced by Marie-Therese Garvey. Juan Carlos Farah and Newertown Arts are heading an extensive programme of screenings, educational events and a travelling exhibition.

We're extremely grateful to the supporters of this project so far, including Polar photographer (and TED Fellow) Camille Seaman, The Arctic Circle, Patrick Hazard and the London International Documentary Festival, Hull's Maritime Museum, the Norwegian Embassy (UK) and Planet Agents - experts in environmental educational.

Please subscribe to this blog, and keep visiting regularly to read updates on the project....

The Air Is Too Thin Up Here

2011-05-02T18:35:00.005+01:00

Walking on flat ground, slowly, everything seems normal. As it should be. But start to run, or walk uphill, or exert yourself in any way (climbing the stairs, carrying heavy equipment...) and you start to feel the thinness of the air up here. Suddenly ordinary breaths are not enough. You try to breathe deeply, but the oxygen doesn't reach you. You need two breaths for every lung of oxygen. You suddenly feel incapacitated by an elevation of only 1700m, the change is instantaneous. From ordinary breathing to gasping for air in a matter of seconds. Wearing the steadicam, I can only run around 200m next to Salah and his team before I'm about to collapse, desperate for more oxygen, starting to feel ill and off balance. Even one lap of the track, jogging casually, carrying nothing, is a challenge.

I can't conceive of how these runners can sprint uphill, downhill, uphill, downhill. And finish it all with a smile on their faces. The mountains are glorious, beautiful, but they are designed to make life difficult for you.

Salah looks over at the view from the sixth floor of a hotel in the centre of Font Romeu.
"God gave the French heaven on earth. But all he gave us was the desert," he chuckles to himself.
"I think the desert is also heaven on earth," I want to say...

These are critical days for Western Sahara. On April 27 the UN voted to extend its MINURSO mission there for another year. As it does every year. But this year, several countries petitioned for the mandate to include human rights monitoring, something particularly important following the violence in the Gdeim Izik protest camp in November 2010. But that petition came to nothing. The mandate was renewed for another year with no human rights clause...

And so it goes...

Salah doesn't talk much about the UN or the mandate. This isn't where his interests lie. He wakes every morning around 9am, runs to his first training session at the track, trains for about an hour, runs back home, eats lunch, rests, runs back to the track for the afternoon training session, back home for dinner. At night, he laughs with his friends over a poker game, or watches a football match on a giant television at the local bowling alley.

We shoot two ambitious sequences. First, the team is training in the forest around 25km from Font Romeu. We rent a bicycle in town and attach a trailer to it. I'm sitting in the trailer with the camera mounted on a steadicam. Everything is set up as it should be, we only realise once we're moving that pulling the heavy trailer and steadicam is even harder than running uphill at this altitude. We manage only two long shots, switching riders in between shots. But the timing is perfect and we get what we were looking for.

Next, a long take of Salah and Mohammad running through the streets of Font Romeu. I'm sitting in the back of the Renault Clio, the hatchback open and my legs dangling over the back, dragging close to the surface of the street. The steadicam is mounted, weighing me down. Brendan sits in the back seat gripping the steadicam vest as tightly as he can. Mar is driving extremely slowly, paced perfectly in time with the runner, as we come around bends and carve a smooth arc with the camera, floating over the road that the runner's feet are pounding. The camera's motion is light and elegant, all the movements of the car, the runners, and the steadicam are synchronised in fluid curves that belie the immense strain Brendan and I are under. At the end of the shot, I can't make a fist with my right hand anymore and my legs are numb. Brendan's arms are aching after twenty minutes of holding my life in his hands - making sure I (and the camera) don't fall out every time the car accelerates.

I'm constantly thinking of the fiction versus the documentary film. The fiction film acts as though no one is present behind the camera. Does the documentary want the same thing? I don't think so. I want it to be known that we are there, that we are interfering and enquiring with our equipment. This is how we tell the story. The camera needs to be the witness. The documentary doesn't want aesthetic perfection, but perfection in the storytelling process. The filmmakers should be able to watch the film and sense a presence, yet not recognise that it is their presence. The film should look familiar, but they should not recognise that it was made by them. It should be reminiscent and unfamiliar at the same time. It should be intimate and dislocated at the same time. It should still have the power to entertain, surprise and enthral.

Avignon, He Was Only Born In 1989

2011-04-28T16:05:00.006+01:00

We drive into Avignon, and for the first time I notice the route is beautiful. I've never seen this view before. The first two times I visited Avignon was by train. The next time I fell asleep in the car. This time we drove along roads through rock cliffs, vineyards, and the Rhone river.

Mostapha is there, with Hossam and three other friends and relatives, also Sahrawi. Five people in the small, one bedroom flat. They've moved things around in the flat, cleaned the place up. Walls are re-wallpapered, the bathroom's been repainted. Even with so many people in the flat, Mostapha insists we stay with them overnight. But we decline, deciding instead to get a hotel room, it would be more comfortable for everyone. The window of our hotel room faces the medieval walls of Avignon. As we drive through the old town in the afternoon, in the sun, it looks appealing to me in a way it hasn't looked before.

Mostapha tells me the news of his application - he was successful in his first interview for political asylum, now he's been given three months here. Then he applies again for the next round of paperwork, a residency. In our long interview, I ask him awkward questions about the difficult choices he's made in his life. Choices he was forced into it. He gave so much but never got anything in return. That kind of situation can force us to make choices out of desperation. Mostapha is only a year older than me.

He talks about his father, and his father's illness. This is why he came to France. Not for himself but for his family. "I'm scared more for my family than for myself" he tells me. "I'm scared for Salah."He wants to bring them all over to France here even though this exact moment - with this wave of rebellions in the Arab World - offers a real chance for something to change in Western Sahara. Now, Mostapha says, the Sahrawi could really take advantage of the current climate and attack. He would be willing to die for independence, he says. A revolution will take lives, there's no way around it. No way to avoid it. If you want your freedom, you don't sit around waiting for it. You have to go out and fight for it. And be willing to die for it.

It seems strange coming from him. He doesn't seem, to me, like someone driven by this revolutionary zeal. The fervour, the drive to die for a cause. But like he said, he's a volcano.

Each brother approaches his rage in a different way. Abacheikh was born in 1989. Do we even know how to deal with rage at 21? 22?

Look at your calendar: before the massacres in Syria and Libya, before the disgrace of Bahrain and Yemen, before the Egyptian "revolution", and the Tunisian revolution, there was the Gdim Izik camp in Western Sahara. November 2010. Salah visited the camp in its early days. Soon after he left, Gdim Izik exploded with violence and killings. His legend was assured when the Moroccan authorities said he was responsible for igniting the protest. He must have been flattered to hear that.

Midnight half-marathon

2011-01-08T01:11:00.002Z

Last night, for the challenge, I kept running. The route is usually 8 miles. But if I look behind me at around mile 6, I can see the fork in the road, the split where Bishopsgate becomes Commercial Street, then Tower Bridge, then Millennium Bridge, and on and on. This is where I came from. If I turn around, instead of continuing straight, returning home, I can repeat this part of the route - Commercial Street, Tower Bridge, Millennium Bridge, and on and on. I did.

It meant another trip along the river, around the towers, over the corrugated metal, over cobble streets, bridge, steps, road, pavement. Then I head home. At the corner of Barrett's Grove, I've run a half-marathon distance. Just for the challenge of it. I passed many things along the way:

Two police "stop and searches"
An elderly prostitute
A man snorting cocaine in the car park of a wine supermarket
A familiar homeless woman. Then she appeared about 500 metres away, somehow in front of me again.
An office building, someone still working inside
Turkish musicians, playing at the curb
Tourists photographing themselves on Tower Bridge
A man, walking to work
Two couples arguing
A bouncer, getting agressive
A couple, kissing
Foxes. Many foxes.

How Is It Possible To Create Oblivion?

2010-12-08T23:41:00.009Z

StoryDoc brings us to Athens, and I try to remember when I was here last. I recall, from my parents' stories, that we were here as a family when I was a child. Maybe only two or three years old. But I can't be sure. Driving into the city on my way from the airport, I remember I was in transit here a few years ago, as well. I don't remember where from, or where to. But I had a layover of several hours in the airport, and I took a bus into the city. I bought a coffee, and a small notebook.

In "Stolen Antiquities: The Story of the Parthenon Marbles", someone says the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece, because this is where they need to be seen. "In the light of Athens. In the air of Athens." I see that light around every corner. It floods into the streets from the perpendicular avenues to the East. It blinds me every morning when I come around the corner onto Panepistimiou street, heading towards Titania Hotel, or the Goethe Institute for our sessions. At times the sun slithers through the street, reflecting off the white marble walls, like fire.

On our second day, there is real fire on the streets. Demonstrations to mark the two year anniversary of the killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. And, more recently, anger at corrupt politicians and the IMF bailout. Glass is broken, telephone booths and mail boxes are overturned and set on fire. Police fire tear gas, we walk through the hanging clouds on our way to dinner. It's still in the air as we're eating. We can hear percussion grenades exploding loudly outside while we discuss our projects, in a surreal juxtaposition.

There is a screening of Into Eternity, a film of incredible beauty and boldness. A science-fiction poem about the life span of nuclear waste, and the eternal tomb being built under the bedrock of Onkalo, Finland to contain it. I am mesmerized by the movement, and the voice of Madsen, questioning "how is it possible to create oblivion? How can we remember to forget?" Because this what Onkalo asks us to do: bury the waste in a giant tomb and then forget it ever existed. Hope future generations never think to dig it up. Because this facility needs to last over 100,000 years. We've never built anything to last that long.

I'm trying to clarify the story of The Runner in my head. What is at the core?
Is it endurance?
Heroism?
Symbolism?

Niels Pagh Andersen talks about this core. He urges us to find it. He asks us to simplify, simplify, distill, reduce, simplify. What is the essence? The events, details, statistics may be complicated but the story is simple. It must be simple. How, otherwise, do you know what you're looking for? You may not know how your film will end (I don't...) but you must know the question that you're trying to answer.

How far, before you stop running?

Sanna Salmenkallio and her music of intensity and restraint. Witholding. Don't give too much away. It reminds me of Walter Murch, cutting out significant portions of a scene, withholding them until later. Or getting rid of them entirely. They may take on a new significance at a later point in the film, or if not, the whole story may be greater with less. Sanna says "film music is ritual music. It doesn't matter how it sounds, as long as it works. We don't want to think about the details...we want to see through the music."

"Bury me standing." This is the endurance of Maria Tanase. Her voice could melt lead, her eyes burn a hole through your heart and seduce you at the same time. "Maria Apassionata." We may all find our own way of resisting.

How far, before you stop running?

On our final night, after ten days of little sleep, we walk through the Gazi neighbourhood looking for a drink. These giant eyes peer down on us from a nearby wall.

A pregnant dog follows us from her owner's garage to the corner of Gazi's bar district.

And it's a long night. History here in Gazi is like Dalston, or Shoreditch before her, or New York's Soho, or the most fashionable neighbourhood of any city. The industrial sites turn to ruins, are then given over to artists, then to developers. But Athens today needs to be isolated from these cycles of ruin and fortunes. On my last day, Dominique Strauss-Kahn visits the city, and there are more protests planned against the latest conditions to be imposed on the country.

Seven Years Later, The Reunion

2010-12-03T01:40:00.002Z

The shoot in Avignon is over. From my desk in London, I remember one thing overall. Salah's dedication, his singular obsession with the Sahrawis, remaining within their orbit, trying to stay as close to their centre as possible. He is constantly connected to the news from the camps and Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. He falls asleep listening to Sahrawi radio, people from around the world calling in to share their thoughts on the latest news, events, rumours. This is his universe, and he can't stand to be too far from it.

This film is not a traditional portrait, with archive pictures, histories, and disembodied narratives. This is not a historical reportage. This is a zoetrope. The perception of a full story is achieved only by peeking through thin slits as they spin quickly by. You see blinking movement, only brief glimpses. The images themselves are still but the cylinder, spinning around, gives the impression of motion.

Last night, I watched with Salah a video of him returning to Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara for the first time in 7 years. He hadn't seen his family for seven years. His mother, father, his brothers and sisters, his cousins, aunts and uncles. When he left seven years ago he was just a good athlete. When he returned he was a symbol of everything that gave the people hope. In the video, he is surrounded by cheering friends and family. Outside the tent, visible on the edges of the video, are rows of Moroccan police watching, taking pictures of everyone who attends.

You can see the joy on the faces of the crowds, clamouring to hug Salah and welcome him back. You can hear the excitement in their cheers. Salah, all the while, is overwhelmed. He occasionally spots a familiar face and breaks into a smile, but otherwise his eyes look around, searching for something familiar. He is not expecting this. There is very little familiar about it. There is a mixture of joy - the reunion - and loss. This would, after all, have to end.

On the train back to London, I can see the snow is thick on the ground. This is far from where I last saw Salah, in the Algerian Sahara. On Sunday, I'll fly to Athens to pitch the film for the last time this year.

The Only Thing Certain Is That Nothing Is Certain

2010-12-01T12:57:00.002Z

Paris is freezing. My hands are in pain, trying to hold the metal of the camera. The sting of the cold is almost too much. I think of the men and women I saw last night sleeping in the waiting room of Gare de Lyon.

There's a mist of frost over the city. Mostapha is here for his asylum application interview. Last night, the friend we were staying with in Paris asked Mostapha "do you want to know the history of Western Sahara?" as preparation for his interview. They've been going through significant dates together, to make sure the timeline is accurate. They watch an online video of an interview with an Egyptian Sheikh explaining the history of Western Sahara, but Mostapha doesn't like some of his conclusions. He shakes his head and tuts when the Sheikh says Western Sahara was part of the Moroccan Kingdom. "He's lying."

The next morning, in a cafe near the ministry of refugee affairs, we sit waiting for the offices to open, trying to stay warm. Mostapha is still running through the details of his journey to France, and his reasons for applying for asylum, to get everything straight and clear in his head. He disappears for a few minutes, and we smile when he emerges from the bathroom wearing his Dra'a, long blue robe, with the folds of cloth wrapped around his arm. We're used to seeing him in jeans and a t-shirt, but he says it's important to wear the Dra'a for his interview. He takes pride in it, even though it means he'll suffer from the cold on the walk to his interview. We wish him luck and he leaves a little early to make his 9am appointment.

An hour later, he returns to the cafe, a smile on his face. "It was fine," he says, calmly. "Their questions were simple. They asked how I got here to France and about my background and my family. I think it was fine. They say I'll get a decision in one month." We sit down for another coffee.

Later, back in Avignon, Hossam asks "what if they don't accept his application?" But I don't know the answer.

I'm reminded of certain arguments. They're not far from the arguments we always have about Palestine. There are differences of opinion about how to approach the Sahrawi cause - differences that are becoming clearer to me now. The recent protest camp, and all the violence that followed, has split the opinions of the Sahrawi down the middle. "We have the right to defend ourselves" one said. "No, those camps were a shame on us and all Sahrawi" another told me, "violence only breeds violence."

Some say Moroccan policemen were slaughtered like sheep. Others say it's not true, those videos were fake. We don't now the real number of dead and injured. We don't know the real timeline of events. Was anyone else there to witness? The only thing certain is that nothing is certain.

3 Million People. Is It Possible?

2010-11-28T22:53:00.002Z

Mustafa wakes up at 6am, heading to Paris for an interview to determine his asylum status, to determine if his claim is real or not. I wake up with him and film the rituals. Packing your bag is a ritual. Praying is a ritual. I wish him good luck, now that his life here in France is in the hands of a panel of assessors.

A demonstration today in Rabat, against the call for a UN investigation into the recent violence in Western Sahara. Salah and Hossam are entranced by the television coverage. There is Moroccan news, celebrating the nationalist demonstration. They say there are 3 million people. Is it possible? Other news outlets call the number "inflated".

What strikes me the most is that the protesters hold up placards with a red hand, the hand of Fatma, and the words "Don't touch my country" written above. I recognise those placards. They were used in May of 2003, when a series of deadly bombings - a phenomenon that seemed to be seeping across the Arab World - first hit Morocco. Morocco had never seen anything like it. I stood with the crowds, staring at the bombed out hotel the next morning, in disbelief. "We don't deserve this" they thought. Then, they were right to say "Don't touch my country" to the bombers. But now, those words seem out of place, misused.

Around sunset, I want to film Salah's neighbourhood. He says it's not safe to film outside, the guys that hang around the building - he says they're drug dealers - and the other locals wouldn't like it. But it's necessary. It's a simple request, to film the outside of his building at sunset. No people. No names. Just the building. But everyone approaches me with questions. The first man is just curious. In my broken French, I explain the film, and what I'm doing here. He admires the camera. The next person is more aggressive. A boy, he only tells me to stop filming, but instead I have a discussion with him about the film. If you want me to stop filming, I'll stop, I tell him. But I only want to film the neighbourhood, nothing else. He seems satisfied. Later, an older man shows up with two of the boys who are in front of Salah's door every night playing cards by the light of a gas heater. He may be their father. He's a mixture of curios and suspicious. When he finally seems satisfied with my explanation, he asks "why isn't Salah here with you? Why are you here alone?" as if to say 'this isn't safe for you.'

I only manage two shots, between the children jumping in front of the camera, and the questions. When I go back inside the flat, Salah seems surprised. "You went outside? It's not safe." I know. But it had to be done. How can I tell this story without filming the outside of your building? In the back of my mind, though I don't say it, I'm thinking "I've been threatened at gunpoint in Gaza for filming, interrogated and followed by Hezbollah, intimidated by a Burundian general for asking the wrong questions. I think I can deal with a few neighbourhood drug dealers." I can't, of course, but these experiences offer a cloak of invincibility, a false sense of security. Often those most mundane and insignificant dangers are the ones that get us in the end.

Later that night, as if to prove Salah's point, the police raid the building looking for some of those boys.

Avignon, the second day

2010-11-27T14:02:00.002Z

This neighbourhood of Avignon is compact, buildings back to back. They look the same. The taxi driver who brought me here from the train station had to look at a map to find the exact location of building 28. I ask the teenager standing by the front of the building if he knows Salah, and he leads me to his door.

Salah's flat is compact - a one person flat, now with his brother and cousin living here. Now we are four in this space, a living room/kitchen and a bedroom. There's no privacy for any of them, no chance to be alone. Now I understand what Salah meant when he told me, in the refugee camps in Algeria, "I feel free here." I didn't understand it at the time. I thought it was rhetorical, a conceptual freedom. But it was real. There are no walls there. No clocks. No identical high-rise council blocks. No paperwork for refugee status and unemployment benefits to take care of.

The three - Salah, his brother Mustafa and his cousin Hossam - are in the flat most of the day. Salah leaves only to run, or to buy food for the family. Otherwise, they are permanent residents of this space. Cuban, Algerian, Sahrawi and Basque flags are spread out across the walls. Shelves lined with Salah's trophies. In the next room, watching television, Mustafa yells to his brother to come quickly whenever Western Sahara is mentioned in the news. Salah is in front of his computer, connected to forums, online news and radio stations with news of Western Sahara, the protest camp and international condemnation of Morocco towards the demonstrators. He is immersed in that world.

"I need to rest," he tells me. "I've been travelling so much lately, and now thinking about 'the case' all the time." 'The case', they call it. It means everything. The occupation, the camps, the violence, decisions of the European Parliament, family, everything.

But he runs, outside, in the cold, in the rain. He runs with his friends, on the track and on trails along the river. 20 minutes later he's back in the car, driving to building 28 again.

To Paris And Avignon

2010-11-25T20:14:00.002Z

I travel to Paris for the first time in around 17 years. The last time I was here, my friend was attacked in the streets - blood pooling on the pavement - and taken to hospital. I watched, stunned. This time was much less dramatic. I fell asleep on the train in London (slept only four hours, in fits, the night before ) and woke up in Paris. I texted Mohanad, another Palestinian filmmaker, previously living in London, now living in Paris on an artist's residency.

We walked through the halls of his dormitory (once a hospital - perhaps that's the connection to my previous visit to Paris) and spoke about revolutionary cinema. He referes to Paris 1968, and the Palestine Film Unit, the use of the image, propaganda, structuralism, Vertov and the notebook. But Mohanad says the spirit of the artist is dead. This is the building where the students of 1968 would meet, in the common room. But they closed the common room then, and it never opened again. Now the students here talk about art, he says, but without the same spirit.

We get a visit from Dominique, himllef of the era of French revolutionary film. Now his focus is Palestinian cinema. He wears round glasses and drinks herbal tea. He draws a timeline on the wall of Mohanad's studio.

Later, around the corner from Mohanad's flat, we meet Raed, also a Palestinian filmmaker. We sit drinking coffee and beer and eating falafal. Are we "a movement" now? The three of us? Three Palestinian documentary filmmakers in Paris? I will say that we were, suddenly and temporarily, a movement. We have yet to decide on a name. We talk about feature films, Producers, cameras, therapy. We watch films online and get excited by the capacity of other Palestinian filmmakers to create. Even under the most difficult of circumstances. Raed watches the latest material from The Runner and asks me to keep in touch about it. He might know some people who would be interested.

Into the rain, we walk quickly to a bar around the corner. Qadr's bar. An Algerian, Qadr has served and danced with people like Cheb Khaled and Nas El Ghiwan in this tiny bar. We drink Calva - liquor made, I think, from apples? - sipping it in tiny glasses like Moroccan tea. I can barely keep my eyes open, I'm falling asleep.

The next morning, up early again for the train to Avignon. The sun doesn't rise for another hour after I board the train. Like the Eurostar, I fall asleep as soon as we pull out of Gare de Lyon, only managing a few pages of Conversations. Two Egyptians are talking quietly in the seat in front of me. Two French teenagers squeal a loud conversation for the entire journey. But I don't mind. I'm gone. I wake up as we pull into Avignon. In Avignon, the air is beautifully clean. The sun pierces through the thin, cold atmosphere. I haul my luggage and camera equipment into a taxi to meet Salah - in his flat - for the first time since we filmed together in Algeria in February. Now we are about to continue filming. This, I tell myself, is the start of the real production of the documentary. Everything previous was development.

I Feel That Moment, A Rush In My Veins

2010-09-30T00:50:00.002+01:00

I felt - for the first time - the exact moment when the endorphins kicked in. The rush through my veins when suddenly my pace, my breathing, my psychology changed. It was 2.5km into a run, off-road, 10pm, heavy rain. It was as I turned into the south-west corner of Hackney downs, where the road disappears behind rows of trees and the trail becomes a thin scratch of dirt. There was a wave of calm, a ripple that suddenly but carefully relaxed my legs and my rapidly beating heart. My feet suddenly felt lighter. My stride suddenly felt like it could go on forever. It was as if a giant hand was lifting me gently from the back of my shirt, saying, "take some of that weight off your feet."

And my psychology changed, my mood was lighter, my brain reacting to the sudden intake. There was a rush of excitement. I saw someone walking their dog on the path. The owner ignored me, but the dog looked up and followed me as I floated past. I waved at the dog, smiling.

I was able to forget, momentarily. The rain was warm.

I was thinking of the conversation I had had the day before with Abdelfattah, the man I followed for several weeks for my first documentary I See The Stars At Noon. I've stayed in touch with him since those days in 2004 when I filmed him as he tried to cross into Spain from Morocco's northern coast. I recently sent him a copy of the film, after six years. I wasn't ready to hear his opinion until then. Finally I gave in and sent it. He watched it almost immediately, and told me later, on the phone, "Saeed, this is a real documentary." I took it as a compliment.

"But why is it so sad?" he asked "You made everything look worse than it was."
"There are some good moments," I replied, perhaps slightly defensive. "The conversations we had, the time we sang together. But honestly," I explained, "the film reflects the way I was feeling when I made it. It was very difficult spending so much time with you, it was depressing. Don't you remember?" Yes, he said, he remembered.

Yesterday, he asked why I made films. "There are so many problems in the world, and you want to solve them all. You can't solve them all." He didn't believe that films could change things. I said I didn't want to change things, I just wanted to make good films, tell good stories. If one person came out of a film of mine with a better understanding, that was an added extra, but that wasn't my goal. If one person watched his film and said "now I understand something more about what life is like in Morocco," I would be satisfied.

"I think you need to sit down, quietly on your own, and consider what you're doing. I think there's something else you could be doing."
"But this is the conclusion I've come to after years of trying to decide what to do. This is what I believe in."

He didn't seem entirely convinced.

I Break The Barrier

2010-09-16T00:41:00.003+01:00

I run and run and run. My knee, injured in 2004, now gives me no pain. I can feel only the ground under my feet, my ankles flicking my feet back. My arms swaying sharply, but gently. I can't see any details in the park, it's 10 o'clock at night. A few runners pass me going in the other direction, otherwise I pass only late night dog-walkers. I'm training. For what, I don't know. But I do know this is necessary for The Runner.

Tonight I ran 8.8 km. This is the farthest I've run since my injury, all on trails and uneven ground. I run the last 1km barefoot. I recently read Born To Run - Chris McDougall's inspiring book about natural running gurus. They run barefoot. I try it out of curiosity but with pessemism. And soon I am floating. Running on trails, in my shoes, I feel a new lightness. I'm just skimming the ground with my feet. Hovering over the uneven surfaces of grass, mud and pavement. But barefoot, on the flat road, I am even lighter. I leave no impact on the ground. I am weightless. I understand now why endurance runners, when they first try barefoot running, are transformed. They are amazed by the simplicity of it. It is now that I realise how humans were designed to run long distances. It is like this. Without thick soled running shoes.

Light. Light. Light. Chris says to keep reminding yourself, as you run, light - light - light. If you can perfect this, fast will come later. Don't concentrate on fast. Don't think about fast. Think about light, and you'll become fast.

The Roads Were Closed, The Exhibition Open

2010-08-23T01:06:00.003+01:00

On the day my Hull exhibition was to open, a fatal car accident. The roads were closed. No one could cross the bridge to the other side of the city, and the main road in front of the venue, the ARC building, was silent. Sarah and I walked to lunch, into the stillness of an abandoned city. How strange, I thought, that as we presented an exhibition on the relationship between the people and the city, the city itself was - in reality - empty of people. The roads had, for a moment, rejected their inhabitants and refused passage.

This exhibition was for these streets of Hull. These rivers and estuaries, these mills and factories and all the people inside and outside them. All my images and captions were designed for those who would recognise the locations and names. I didn't want to have to explain it to anyone else. I wanted just enough information for the local to recognise, but the visitor to have to ask questions. The gallery opened, and I was happy to hear people identifying the streets and locations of these photographs.

Sheila, whom I have never met, offered this quote to accompany my writing and images. From the British seascape artist J.S. Lowry, they express perfectly my fascination with this city:

"It's the battle of life - the turbulence of the sea...I have been fond of the sea all my life, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is. But I often think...what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn't turn the tide? And it came straight on? If it didn't stay and came on and on and on...That would be the end of it all."

You can see the full final selection of 15 images here.

The City Compels Me, The Sea Draws Me In

2010-08-18T00:57:00.006+01:00

The smell of East Hull was once tanneries, grain, chocolate. The smell of west hull was fish and oil. When the wind would change directions, they would look over to the other side of the river and complain about 'yon side.'

Sarah and I went looking for what was left of East Hull's milling industry. But The British Extraction Co. is empty. A shell of a monument to an impossible staircase. No one would climb it, except kids and adventurers after the mill was closed down. They had to remove the bottom steps to stop anyone else from climbing because they thought it was too dangerous. Behind it, the chimney of an abandoned paint factory. This is the spire to the cathedral of the Extraction Co.

The only grain mill left in Hull looks like a yellow-topped box of cereal. Its name reminds me of a fictional corporation from a cheap conspiracy movie, one in which the unscrupulous grain company begins working on indigenous land and exploiting its workers. Using natives as slaves and devastating the ecology.

The man at the reception tells us we can't take pictures in there without permission from the boss. And the boss is away at the moment. Even when he returns, we're told, the last thing he'll want to do is deal with us. He'll have other things on his mind. It's clear the mill is having some kind of serious trouble, but I can't get exact details. There is another man behind the reception, wearing a white all-in-one suite, the kind you see forensic police wearing when they survey a crime scene. He barely talks, and then only with a certain bitterness and resignation. It's clear he doesn't want to help. The two want o get rid of us, so they shown us samples of what the mill produces, in small clinical jars kept behind the reception, labeled clearly with each grain type and size. They specialise in grits.

After talking to the man behind the reception for around 10 minutes, the man in the forensic suit seems to suddenly give in. Maybe he got bored of sitting there and avoiding questions. He mentions the old Rank Hovis mill, once a landmark in Hull. "I have a few old photographs I could show you," he says, and leads Sarah and I into the factory.

In his office, he keeps an archive of the old mill, the mill where he worked for 30 years and was General Manager before it shut down. "A graduate could have made Manager in five years, but it took me 30 years," he says. He shows us pictures of the equipment, proudly explaining that the entire mill was run by only one engine. I call it a motor at one point, but he quickly corrects me "It was an engine, not a motor." He shows us newspaper clippings about the mill, some going back to just after the Second World War. He even has the original architectural plans from when the mill was renovated. He carefully holds a photograph by its edges, so as not to get his fingerprints on the image. It's a photograph of his father, graduating from a City & Guilds course as a miller. His grandfather, too, was a miller. He has taken on the responsibility of the keeper, the last source of these images, stories and memories. On our way out, he tells us his name is Robin - he had been named after the Kingston Rovers Rugby team mascot, a Robin red breast.

When I hear the name J. Arthur Rank, I think of films. He began as a miller, but that was never important to me. What mattered to me was the logo of a strong man swinging a giant mallet, and the tone that resonated when he hit an enormous golden gong. That logo was the opening of so many films I watched as a child, when I became fascinated by cinema and the symbols it could sustain. Those are my own memories of the Rank name.

Hull, you surprise me. I am embarrassed to say what I expected you to be like, but you are not like that. You welcomed me, you spoke to me when I was too shy and introduced yourself. You opened up to me, and told me stories of your life within minutes of meeting me. You took me at face value, and only once asked me where I was from. You said I was funny, because I would rather take pictures in the war zones of Southern Lebanon than photograph a wedding. Yes, once you asked me "Are you Sheikh Mohammed?" and laughed, but I didn't mind because you made fun of yourself with the same relentlessness. And when I thought I was finished, that I had taken my last photograph but still could not solve your mystery, I found the Blue Lagoon.

I ask Jason about the sea, and he reveals to me a fact that puts everything into place. Suddenly Hull's true character, and her relationship to her people, is clear to me. "I don't know why," he says, "but Hull is a Mecca for scuba diving. More scuba divers are trained in this city than in any other in the UK."

It is irrefutable proof that something is still drawing the people of Hull to the water.

The exhibition opens August 20th, 6pm at the ARC building in Hull

I Continue To Run (faster...)

2010-08-06T22:25:00.004+01:00

My fourth run, as part of my training. What I'm training for, I don't yet know. But I know I must do this. I'll find something to train for later, but for now I'll keep running. Part of me wants to know how Salah feels, the Sahrawi runner I'm following in my documentary The Runner. Part of me just wants to get into shape again. And part of me wants to challenge my knee, injured in 2004 when I was training for a marathon and holding me back ever since. I have remained afraid of him for years. He has dictated what I can and cannot do, how far I can push myself. Now I've had enough. I want to tell him what's what.

Tonight was my fourth run. My fourth circuit of a modest 2.5km, trying first to get my body used to running again. I've quickly realised the obvious fact that running at night (when the weather's cool) is easier than running during the day (when it's hot). I've overcome the burning throat and strained lungs that first welcomed me. I've overcome the aching muscles of - not the next day, but strangely - the second day after the run. I decided the best way to beat that second day pain was to run through it. I'm using a tough love approach with my knee. I'm considerate to him, but I will show no mercy.

I try to remember what I think about when I'm running, because Murakami says only people who don't run would ask a runner "what do you think about when you run?" I asked Salah that, months ago, before I started running. I asked him many times, because I wasn't satisfied with this answer. But now I realise, perhaps "nothing" is the real answer. Perhaps "nothing" is the only answer. So far, I wouldn't say I think about nothing, but I don't think about anything with any purpose. Instead, my mind becomes a naive, newborn, empty bowl into which every thought and vision flying passed my head must swish around for a brief moment before spilling out and being replaced by a new thought.

I think about how to properly cook eggplant
I think about how I would be received across the finish line if I were a world-class runner
I think about the locals sitting at the pub that I pass
I think about the pressure of the pads of my feet hitting the pavement
I wonder how long my knee will last
I think about...wait...now I can't remember what I was thinking about.

A Tale of Two Roads

2010-07-31T22:50:00.002+01:00

A Northeast Coast Town. That's what they called Hull during the Second World War when they reported the heavy damage it suffered under the Blitz. They didn't want to name it directly, in case the enemy was listening. Few people in Britain outside of Hull knew what they were referring to.

But it stayed standing. It didn't surrender or lay down and die. Today, the city routinely comes bottom of the list: worst schools in the UK, worst quality of life and prospects, highest unemployment. It was once a town rich on fishing and whaling money.

But Hull surprises me. People don't look at me with suspicion. That's what I expected. That was my own prejudice, I'm ashamed to say. Two minutes of conversation and they have all the time in the world for me, two more minutes and they're telling me their life stories.

Malcolm now works at a school for pregnant teenage girls. It was once the School for Fishermen, teaching boys how to work on trawlers in the North Sea. Malcolm, too, used to work in the fishing industry as a carpenter, repairing the ice boxes in deep-sea trawlers, but when the industry collapsed in 1974, he was made redundant. It was only coincidence that he found a job as a caretaker for what used to be the School for Fishermen.

I ask if he misses working on the docks. "Strange as it sounds, yes. I even took a pay cut to keep working there. It was hard work but it kept you fit." Today there's almost no fishing out of the West Hull docks, just a few fish packing warehouses. The docks have been filled in and converted into megastores and shopping centres.

In Purdy's fish warehouse, Dave is filleting the day's catch. He tells me he started working on the docks when he was only 15, and he's been working with fish ever since. I ask if he ever worked on a trawler, "No, it's a different breed of person who can work on a trawler." Out to sea for weeks, sailing as far as Iceland. Ash laughs when I tell him I'm going to East Hull next. "When you go to the East, all you'll be photographing is rats!"

I think of Tarfiyyah, where I photographed fishermen on the border of Western Sahara in 2003. And Newlyn, where I shot a short film about the imminent demise of the largest fishing port in the UK, and I wonder what it is that keeps drawing me back to fishing towns. There is something romantic (naive, I admit) about that close connection to the sea. And the fishermen, risking their lives every time they go to work. There's something inherently dramatic about their stories, something that shakes me out of the safety of my every day life.

Sarah and I visit a working man's club. We stare at a group of around ten men, watching horse racing on the television, drinking pints and exchanging jokes with each other. We don't know how to approach them, what do you say? "Can I photograph you, please? Can you tell me about the East/Wet divide in your city?" How do you start to approach someone like that, someone you have nothing in common with? How do you ask them without reducing them to representations and stereotypes?

But minutes after our awkward introductions and they are as intrigued as we are. They exchange banter with us, one man invites Sarah to sit on his knee. They each have their own stories and memories. One man, who must be in his late eighties, tells me about fighting in World War II. "Are you Sheikh Mohammad?" he jokes, pointing to my beard. "You'd have a lot of money if you were." The man sitting across from him leans over and says to me "You'll have to speak louder, he's nearly as old as god!" And he repeats the joke several times throughout the conversation. "He's nearly as old as god!"

And, of course, everyone talks about sports. The competing rugby teams from East and West Hull. They say when Hull FC played at Wembley in the Challenge Cup Final in 2008, the city was emptied as everyone made their way to London to watch the match. And when Hull's football team was promoted to the Premiership, it genuinely boosted the confidence of a city that had been dragged through the mud and humiliated for decades. I've always thought of football and Rugby as childish distractions. I have little time for England's obsession with the sports. But here, in Hull, it means something else. It's a chance for a city - a city that once had great pride and strength - to say "look, I'm worth something. Don't forget it." You have one chance to restore your own sense of self-worth. That's something I have respect for. Old women cried when Hull went to Wembley, and everyone swore it was a day they would never forget.

Posted via email from taji's posterous

The First Two And A Half Kilometres

2010-07-31T19:34:00.001+01:00

I just returned from my first run in a long time. My first run to fulfill my pledge to start running again, as part of the development of The Runner. I need to understand how the subject, Salah, feels. I need to understand what it does to your body, your lungs, your throat, your mind as you compete in long distances. I decided to start with a modest 2.5km, a short distance, something I could complete without much training.

I'm wearing the same running clothes I've been wearing for years. My shoes are still filled with sand from filming in the Algerian Sahara with Salah, in February. Fine, red sand, smooth, not scratchy. I still haven't been able to get it all out of my shoes, it fills the fine mesh on top made for air circulation. There are patches of light red sand on my bedroom floor now, but at least it provides some continuity to this endeavor. It links my run today with the Algerian Sahara where this all began.

As I'm running, I try to concentrate on the pavement, the three steps in front of me. I concentrate on the rhythm of my breathing more than anything else. You can train your legs quite easily, I find, but training your lungs is the real challenge. My legs aren't so bad, I suppose riding my bike everywhere helps keep them in shape. But my lungs haven't had to make this much effort in a long time. I think the last time I ran was around 5 months ago, and even that was only 2km. That was the distance from my front door, up Green Lanes and around the corner from my old house. Now, if I'm going for endurance, a 2km training run is useless.

My legs can take the repetition, but my throat is starting to burn and my lungs are straining, even over this short distance. My sweat pants are far too thick for this hot weather, but I stopped wearing my running shorts years ago when I decided they were really too short. Dom made fun of them once, years ago, when I told him I was going for a run. "In the 1960's?" he asked. Then I decided the shorts were too short, and now I only run in my sweat pants. But I think I need to buy a new pair of (longer) shorts.

I want to know what it feels like to win, again. I fenced competitively for years, and I was good enough to win, but my last bout was around 2004 (was it really so long ago?) I'd like to know that feeling again, the stress, drama and adrenaline of competition. The thrill of winning. The pain of losing. My ideal is to develop my running well enough to do a few races seriously, at least feel that competition again. But it all depends on how well my knee can handle the training.

As I'm running, the warm sun on my face, I remember training in Morocco in 2003. I was training for the Marrakesh marathon. I asked a friend to bring me proper running gear and a pedometer when she came to visit Morocco, and I was taking it seriously. I asked two of my clients, tourists who I had taken on a tour, to draw up a training regime for me. They had completed many marathons and talked me through it. At one point I was up to a maximum daily run of 15km. One morning in Essaouirra (I had to train while I was still leading tours, so I was in a different city every day), I was up to 12km when my knee suddenly gave way. I had to take a taxi back to my hotel. I could barely walk for six days. Weeks later I received an email saying I was registered for the Marrakesh marathon, but I had already quit. I still couldn't walk without feeling pain. I nearly cried with disappointment reading the email. I was angry at my body for letting me down, and mad at myself for not training properly and more carefully. More than seven years later, and my knee is still not back to normal.

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StoryDoc - slices of interior monologue & exterior dialogue

2010-07-25T00:11:00.001+01:00

Salah is a national hero. He is a reluctant symbol. Symbol. "That's what we call our martyrs," he says.

In my development team is Panagiotis, a Greek animator, and Mohammad, a filmmaker and television journalist from Gaza. Mohammad tells the heartbreaking story of his sister getting married, alone. She had only her husband there, no members of her family could get permission to attend her wedding in Jenin. "She was crying the whole time," he says. In his film, Waiting For You, he will try to bring them all together in the same frame, even if he has to use special effects.

How can you reduce the entirety of your film to one sentence, like a news headline? ("One man running to retrieve his country," Peter suggests) Retrieve? It sounds like someone has lost their country, forgotten it in a cafe or lost it down the back of the sofa. Now they have to retrieve it.

The tutors react well to the character of Salah. They like to look into his eyes. They remark on the intensity there.

He has nowhere to be, so he has to keep running. What is he running from? What is he running to?

I have to be secure about the content, about what kind of film this is. I feel I'm still shooting this like a news documentary, but it isn't a news documentary. (Back in London, weeks later, James says the same thing. "What's your personal style? I don't see it here...")

Is he denying his own life for the sake of the cause? What drives him, is it faith or certainty? These are two ends of the spectrum (faith is the will to believe even if it's impossible)

"Tell his story as a reflection of the history of Western Sahara"

Inside my head: What is the one thing? What is the big idea? Is there one big idea, or is it not that kind of film? But, whatever I decide, everyone asks for the one big thing...

(on the way in the elevator to the beach, I think of two things. 1) how bizarre that I'm taking an elevator down to a beach, and 2) how Nico said to me, in the same elevator and without hesitation, "that's why Tarkovsy could never have been Greek." No mysticism, he says. "But I knew if I discussed it with you, you would understand," he says.

Irena refers to Salah as a "Lone Ranger." Eva refers to him as a saint. Is he either of these? I think of him only as a reluctant hero. Irena suggests perhaps he is running to prove his country exists. I'm not sure I enjoy psychoanalysing Salah without him present. (Forgive me, Salah, if we overdo it. This is what the people want...) Irena also remarks "this project requires a lot of energy and patience." Yes, I agree. Like long-distance running. I expect making this film to be as exhausting, as demanding, as trying on my patience and stamina. Later, Panagiotis and Costas, both competitive long-distance runners themselves, say I don't know enough about the sport. Emma agrees. I need to become absorbed in that world. I need to make that mindset my own. I never considered this. A runner is a runner, I thought. But no, Panagiotis explains the "dead zone", about three quarters of the way through a race, when your body is telling you "enough! You must stop! I cannot go on! I was not made for this!" But your mind disagrees. It says "No. Keep going. You must win..." How can I understand the dead zone if I don't understand running?

Then it becomes clear to me. I must start running again. I must understand the stamina and perseverance required.

Iike, in his talk, declares "we are prisoners of the fiction film in documentary," and I cannot disagree. Every time I type his name, I'm struck by the fact that it looks simply as though I've typed "like", as in "to appreciate, admire, have a liking for." But it is, in fact, I (capital "I") i (lowercase "i") k - e. This must frustrate him when he types his own name."We lack a conceptual approach to documentary," he goes on "even though we are immersed in documentary subculture." It is as I've often observed: most filmmakers are more interested in the industry than in the craft of storytelling. Go to any networking event, and the conversation is dominated not by talk of film, but of who now works for which broadcaster, which commissioning editor now heads which strand, which funds are now easy or difficult to get. Spinning the wheels without achieving distance.

"The mysticism of filmmaking is gone" Iike says. He means we no longer gaze in wonder at the camera because we all know how it works. I would also say, the mysticism is gone because filmmakers see it as a formula. Add a number of factors, like camera technology, location, character, sound, money, and after the equals sign, you have a film. But where is the "something else". Where is the unquantifiable factor, that is, the filmmaker herself? Weeks later, I tell my students "The directors that influence you, that you admire, they are not good filmmakers because they know how to use a camera, or how to light a scene, or how to direct an actor. They are good directors because of who they are, because they dedicate their lives to understanding this craft." In all this talk of technology, story, and narrative drive, we forget about the craft.

More wisdom from Iike: "Respect the story. The person in the film is a subject, respect their story. The story is their heart."

And finally, most prescient, "What is worth living for when the life described by the media has no space for me?"

Ghada tells me she wants to hear the sound of Salah running in the opening scenes to my teaser. At the moment, the scenes have no ambient sound. He is running silently. Running without sound is distancing, alienating, she says. Do I want the audience to feel distant? At this point, maybe...

Mikael identifies the heart of the story like this: "Salah took a decision with irreversible consequences, the narrative has to come out of this." I agree. And George sees further. "What is the existential question in the film?" he asks. Later, he uses a word that I will steal from him, "What is Salah's hesitation? At what point does he ask himself if he has done the right thing? At what point does he question himself? At what point does he doubt?" I wonder the same thing. I will ask Salah, "what are your doubts? Where is your hesitation?"

Why the need for a country? The Sahrawi were, after all, nomads...
Sacrifice? Faith? Heroism? Risk? It is a cycle, the more famous and successful Salah becomes, the more he is putting himself and his family at risk.

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It's Enough To Make You Believe in Conspiracies

2010-07-24T18:55:00.001+01:00

Doing preliminary research for an investigation in Israel, I was sitting in the Wellcome Trust Cafe with two other colleagues. We are looking through our notes, discussing the structure this film will take, comparing ideas, characters, concepts, leads. A man walks directly to our table, it looks like he's just walked into the cafe, and stares intently at our notes. He's craning his neck so obviously that two of us laugh at how blatant he is. He makes no attempt to hide his staring. He then sits at the table right next to us, opens his lap top and starts a loud conversation on his phone.

"I was in a Palestinian refugee camp a year ago," he's saying into the phone. "My friend is a doctor, he was there delivering a baby, and he was burned to death! I had to hold his skin back!" He starts repeating the same line over and over again. It begins to seem like he's having this conversation for our benefit, but we're trying to ignore him, carrying on with our work.

He has the conversation again. Louder.
"I was in a Palestinian refugee camp a year ago. My friend is a doctor, he was there delivering a baby, and he was burned to death! I had to hold his skin back!"

The same conversation. Maybe he's not getting the response he wants from us. After a few minutes of this, he leans over to our table and yells,
"What about the British government, investing £7million in Darfur, where up to a million women have been raped! Why aren't you doing anything about that?"

I can't tell if it's a rhetorical question, or if he actually expects an answer. Often, when I'm working on a film, people yell ideas at me. "Why don't you do a film about this!" But they usually mean it as a passionate suggestion, rather than an accusation. This was starting to sound like an accusation.

The man is starting to sound unstable. He's not having a normal conversation, but he's stuck repeating the same story.

"I'm Jewish, a Jewish friend of mine - a doctor - went into a Palestinian refugee camps a year ago to deliver a baby, and he was burned to death! I had to hold his burned skin back!"

"I'm sorry to hear that," I reply.

"No you're not."

Now I know he's not just giving us a suggestion for another film.
He goes on:

"There have been 15 UN resolutions, 14 of them against Israel! Why are you only concentrating on Israel! What about everything going on in Darfur, you people are doing nothing about it!"

Earlier, I was calm. It was slightly amusing. Now I'm starting to lose my temper. Empty accusations. Questioning my morality. It's not something I take lightly. I ask what makes him think he has any business listening to our conversation and getting involved. I ask who he thinks he is morally judging us without knowing anything about us.

"You know nothing about me, or where I'm coming from or what I'm doing." I tell him.
"I don't care. You're an anti-Semite! You're all anti-Semites!" he points to my colleagues at the table with me.

I have to roll my eyes back and look up to heaven in disbelief that he would make the anti-Semite comment less than one minute into our argument. He is revealing himself as a lunatic. We're both yelling loud enough now to get the attention of other people in the cafe.

"I'd be more than happy to have this conversation once you've seen my film" I offer "but at this point you have no idea who I am to start calling me an anti-Semite."

"You're either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew." He replies. "I'm a liberal Jew and I'm also a filmmaker and me and my friend went into a Palestinian refugee camp one year ago and my friend was burned to death," he starts telling the story again.

Security arrives. The man at the nest table starts to get nervous. Security asks what's going on. I tell him the man - out of nowhere - is accusing me of racism. Security asks us both to calm down. The man now starts to get nervous, saying "It's ok. It's ok," but I'm too angry at this point to let it go.

"It's not ok," I reply. "You're accusing me of being an anti-Semite and you know nothing about me. I'm not ok with that." Security gets in between now, urging us again to be calm and pointing out that other people in the cafe are getting nervous.

The man tells his story again, about his friend the doctor getting burned alive.

I can feel, welling up inside me, real anger. The only way I can calm myself down is to end the conversation now. As we move to another table, he says again "anti-Semite". He strokes his gray beard, adjusts his glasses. I know the best thing to do is move to another table, it's the only way to diffuse the rage inside me.

Security comes to our new table, and says thank you for being more reasonable than the other man. There's obviously something wrong with him, he says, and you guys seem to be the more responsible party. My job is to make sure everyone in the cafe feels safe.

But there are still some unanswered questions. I have to wonder how he knew, as soon as he walked in, that we were talking about Palestine and Israel. Why did he decide to sit right beside our table and have what now seems to have been a fake phone conversation, several times over, about his friend the doctor? Why would he accuse us of anti-Semitism immediately? Who was he? Does he know what we're working on? It's enough to make you believe in conspiracies...

Flight to Corfu - (what is the film about...)

2010-07-12T01:07:00.002+01:00

In Greece for the StoryDoc documentary development workshop. I need an answer to this question - what is the film about? Other simple questions that have no answers. What happens in the film? Why should we care? What's new about it? Is it not enough to care about the life of one man?

The Runner is about resilience. The relentless pursuit of a dream, a goal, a height of achievement despite the circumstances so strongly against you. It is about this dream as a cure for the perpetual emptiness of statelessness. I approach my own statelessness through film - this can define my personal narrative and the identity that even I don't fully know. Salah approaches his statelessness through running. For that brief moment, when crowds cheer for him, when they wave the flag, he is a national hero. The hero of nation that doesn't exist. But this doesn't erase the pain of statelessness, so he must keep running.

Myth. Is myth the same as legend? Perhaps the word in Arabic, stura, means both.

The film is not a political story, or the suffering of a victim. These are only elements, vocabulary of the film. It is about this man's relationship to the land around him, his status as someone in exile. With no state, no citizenship. What better way to chase what is missing than by endlessly running? What better way to defy the borders of the occupier? Defiance. Saying I will represent myself as I choose, not as you want me to be. But he's not running away. He's not running towards. He's just running.

(My notes from Edinburgh: The pitch needs more character. It was too dry, too official, too precise. This film is emotional. Intuitive. Personal)

I need to spend some time with him, now, to create that connection and overcome any lasting rhetoric. I don't want rhetoric. We no longer have any need for the rhetorical. I need to stick my neck out more, this time.

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Edinburgh, 6pm

2010-06-14T22:22:00.003+01:00

I shared a train to Edinburgh with Rosie, the dog. She sat in the seat behind me and stuck her nose under my chair, sniffing around my feet and the bag of coffee I had sitting there. Her owner tapped me on the shoulder to ask "Is this the train to Edinburgh?" And I said "I hope so...otherwise we're both going the wrong way."

I slept. I typed. I read. I drank my coffee. I arrived in Edinburgh. I went back to the Granville Guest House where I filmed "Masaraat" two years ago. Saw Bilal at the door and we talked about the breakdancing championships he had just been competing in.

Now, upstairs in my room, preparing for my pitching workshop tomorrow. Tuesday, the training, then the live pitch on Wednesday.

Go, Runner! Fill me with your inspiration and momentum!

Is It Wrong to Not Hate You?

2010-06-03T01:43:00.005+01:00

In Birmingham's city centre, there is - what was supposed to be - a demonstration. A loudspeaker is broadcasting nationalist songs, some celebrating "Britishness", others about how immigrants are stealing benefits from the hard-working folk of the west Midlands. No more than ten people are standing next to a banner that says "Solidarity". The font is very similar to Poland's Solidarity movement, but when I point this out to the man seemingly in charge of the "demonstration" (the only one wearing a suit), he laughs.
"haha. I thought the same thing when I first saw it. But no, it has nothing to do with Lech Walesa."

No, of course not. This is the UK's radical Solidarity union, now defending a teacher named Adam Walker. He is a BNP member and organiser, and from his school laptop he wrote in an online forum about his views that immigrants were "filth" and "savage animals". The General Teaching Council threatened to fire him, and no other union would represent him until Solidarity stepped in. This is why I'm here, filming a short video on the BNP testing the limits of free speech, and often facing a violent reaction when they do.

I don't like the BNP. This isn't a particularly controversial thing to say. But here's where I have to face up to a tricky problem, not to mention a mob of United Against Fascism activists, because I also don't like limiting freedom of speech. I was horrified (and a little confused) when I filmed the UAF and other friendly, socialist defenders of freedom rioting outside the BBC, willing to tear down the gates to stop Nick Griffin from appearing on television.

Explain: a campaigning group established to defend our freedom from fascism, now campaigning to have a politician banned from television? It's a long discussion, and I'm only going to introduce (not try to conclude) it here, but suffice to say this is why I'm in Birmingham. To explore these questions with a camera and microphone. And this is why I was talking to people like Mr. Solidarity, and walking alongside Nick Griffin filming his PR stunt. He applauds the 'victory for freedom of speech' when Mr. Walker emerges from his tribunal victorious, cleared of the charges, allowed to continue teaching.

And this is what I felt, after a long conversation and spending half a day with members, and the leader, of the BNP. Nothing. I didn't feel anger. I didn't feel hate. UAF was there, yelling at Nick to kill himself. I didn't feel compelled to join in. Why? I would have expected to feel something. SOMETHING! But I felt nothing standing next to Nick and Mr. Solidarity (I never got his name), even after he told me early on in our conversation "We're not linked to the BNP'" and then continually referred to the BNP as "we".

Nick just seemed like a politician. A fairly ordinary, slimy, racist politician. Mr. Solidarity seemed even more personable, and if I hadn't seen him fawn over Nick when he finally made an appearance, I probably would have left Birmingham thinking "meh, he was alright. A bit racist, but alright..."

Why was it that I wasn't compelled to join UAF in shouting "Follow your leader! Kill yourself like Adolf Hitler!" (other than the fact that their attempt at writing a catchy slogan was pretty poor.) Why didn't I feel hate? I don't get it. I was actually...I hesitate to say it...interested in interviewing them. (Nick's people have agreed to an interview for this film). I was intrigued by the opportunity to talk to them and stand so close to the man himself and realise he had no devil horns. He is, after all, at the end of his political career, and the BNP were all but destroyed in the May 6 elections. Maybe it was the fact that so few journalists actually would interview them that intrigued me. Maybe I actually enjoyed the BNP's polite attempts to engage someone who was so clearly not in their target demographic.

Maybe I was tempted to ask "so, how much would you actually pay me to be voluntarily repatriated?"

We could have collaborated. "Nick, if you help me create a state to return to, I'll agree to move there. What do you say?"

More to come...

To Hull And Back

2010-05-27T15:05:00.003+01:00

Despite the brilliant, hilarious, bad pun in the title, I did, actually, go to Hull and back for an interview after being shortlisted for the ARC / Arts Council commission for a civic work of art to accompany a new bridge being built across the River Hull.

Six hours, and an £80 train ticket later, I've been awarded the commission along with Hull-based artist Sarah Daniels. They've also decided to make the scale of the commission even bigger, after discovering they had more money.

So stay tuned for more developments. I'll keep you updated following the next step: the community consultation...

In the meantime, you can read more about the commission and see the portfolio I used in my proposal here...

Mother of the Family

2010-02-21T01:25:00.002Z

Still no sign of my bag. I was hoping it would have appeared at night, while I was sleeping. Or early in the morning. It's not clear if my bag even made it out of Algiers. I have no way of knowing...There are mixed messages from everyone - no one seems to have a clear answer. We're going to run out of batteries soon, the charger is in my bag. We've been running up to every other camera crew we see, asking if they have a charger. But "industry standard" seems to mean nothing here. No one else has the same camera.

We are interviewed by Mohammad Salah from SADR TV. He asks what my goal is here, and I say that I don't have a role in finding justice for the Sahrawi people. I'm only a filmmaker. But maybe I can have a role in bringing the message to the UK, where it's virtually unknown. Tell a story, that's what I can do. This is the last colony in Africa, and yet even politicians and parliamentarians don't know about it. Even NGO workers don't know about it. Even human rights defenders don't know about it. Sorry, Sahrawis. Your history is unknown, your cause is a mystery to most people. The name "Western Sahara" means nothing to them except a compass point. This is one of the greatest crimes against you. I wish it wasn't that way. But I'm only a filmmaker. So I tell this story, that can be my role.

Mohammad asks the others (in English) what they think of the future - the future for the Sahrawis. I can't remember what they answered.

Why is it important to win?
Ask Salah: "why is it important to win?"

At one point, Salah says something to his Algerian friends, other runners, about the camera. I can't hear his exact words. That he can't focus when the camera is around? He apologises a few times to his friends. Apologises for the camera? It has influence, the camera. Whoever says they are a fly on the wall, they are invisible, they are merely observing, is deluded. The film is a record of the relationship between you, the subject, and the camera.

Aida Hmaida's House

2010-02-20T23:26:00.003Z

(We're staying in Aida Hmaida's house. Ahmed is her son. He sits quietly in the corner of the room where we sleep and eat)

As we try to follow Salah in a car - he's running along the main road that runs out of Samara camp - the Polisario military police stop us at the end of the road. You need permission to drive out of the camps with foreigners (for our protection, we're told). I remember the Amnesty reports, saying the Sahrawi don't have full freedom of movement, the camps surrounded by Sahrawi and Algerian military.

I shoot a few scenes with a 7D that Jo rented for this trip. I fall in love with the camera, beautiful image, organic movement, the separation and depth of field. And the crazy skewing of the image from the rolling shutter. This is the future of filmmaking, we are told, a "game-changer", as Phillip Bloom calls it.

Saleh is sitting with his friend, Sahel. He tells me he's Moroccan, as a joke, but he says it with such a straight face I believe him. "He's Moroccan but he works with us," he keeps saying. But it's a joke, and they laugh together at the fact that I believed him, and I was surprised and took him seriously. Sahel shows me his leg. He was kidnapped from his house in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, after a demonstration in the early days of the Sahrawi Intifada. His leg was broken so badly - blood everywhere - from the beating, the Moroccans thought he was dead and dumped him in the streets outside the city of Layounne where he lived. A family found him and brought him to hospital. He had pins in his legs for three months, then he got a travel visa to Mauritania, and from there he escaped to the Algerian camps.

(10:30, meet Mohammad Saleh at the centre for an interview)

Mohammad and Saleh talking to me about war: another war is the only solution, they say.
"But the Moroccans will kill you."
We fought them for 15 years already. Then, Morocco was stronger and we were only 4000 men. Now every Sahrawi is a soldier.
I've heard this before, many times before, and still it makes me sad. I hear it all the time in Palestine. Which of us is being unrealistic?

"What's happened with negotiations so far? Nothing. Only war can change the situation."
"I understand what you're saying, but I still don't support the idea of war."
"All the young people in the camps today will tell you the same thing."
And I heard that even back in 2006 on my first visit.

I'm still struggling over this question: should interviews be done in the field, as casual interactions between subject and camera, or in a controlled and formalised environment? There is a separation in the formal interview, a disembodiment from the rest of the film, a detached talking head. But here is also more technical control and an isolation in the formal interview that can be advantageous. I still have no answer for this, and though the question is exciting, offering a lot of possible answers, this lack of decision is tying my hands. I'm frustrated between the two choices, two very different approaches . I still haven't done any "interviews" as such, but instead I've asked questions casually from behind the camera. Where to go with this..?

One Hour of Sleep

2010-02-20T15:05:00.003Z

Our team arrives in the Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest Algeria. My bag is missing. I knew something would happen, when I spent almost an hour checking in. They charged me for excess baggage, and I went to another counter to pay. Then they realised I was still within the limit - they shouldn't have charged me - so I had to go back to the same counter again to get my refund. I then regretted bringing the second tripod, far too heavy and useless for this trip, so we had to unpack and send the tripod downstairs to Left Luggage. Abandoning it, I felt much more efficient, lighter. I should have trusted my instincts, my first thought: not to bring it.

By the time I checked in and put my bag into the oversized belt, I had a feeling something would go wrong. It never made it to Algiers. It never got on the flight from London. The battery charger is our biggest concern, so we plan to be very selective about what we shoot. Never mind a change of clothes...I remember Ken Loach's advice "know exactly what you're going to shoot. Don't shoot too much." and I see the lack of battery charger as an exercise in control and limitations. Like The Five Obstructions.

In the airport, Salah tells me he almost didn't come to Algeria. He wasn't feeling in the right frame of mind to race, and his brother - who just moved to France - is having trouble settling in. But then, he thought, "for the sake of the film I have to come." I like this sentiment, and I know I need to include it in the documentary later.

Salah tells me what it was like in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. The authorities tried to bribe him to be loyal to Morocco, he says. They sent women, honey traps, to convince him. I know this, too, will have to be brought up again, on camera. I start thinking about how much I can ask him at this point in our film, at this point in our understanding of each other (can I call it a "friendship?"). I know there are some questions that will have to wait until we meet again in France, with more time to relax and sit down casually to talk. I enjoy this, getting to know him through the process of making the film. I don't want to know everything at once. Drawing it out. If the film can span the length of time it takes to get to know him, it will be perfectly parallel to the revelation of information, the exposition of story. The two can develop in together.

The crew often asks me "how does he feel about running for Morocco?"
"I don't know"
"Haven't you asked him?"
"No."
"Don't you want to know?"
"Yes."

This becomes the mantra of the trip. "I don't know." It become an automatic reflex. "I don't know." I don't want to know. If I knew everything now, what sort of journey would this be with Salah? Where is the investigation? Where is the unfolding of facts and realisations?

Later thought: I keep saying I don't want it to be a political film, but people keep talking politics. Is this part of the story? Am I forcing something that isn't accurate? (This will come back to bite me in the ass on the last day of the trip...)

Next morning in the camps. Salah is tired. He slept less than an hour last night. "When I'm really tired, I can't sleep," he says, by way of an explanation, but I don't understand. He walks through the camps and runs into friends along the way. He seems heavy, a lot on his mind. He's still not sure what distance he's going to run on the 22nd, asks me "I'd rather run the 5k, but maybe the 10km is better for the film?"

I'm still waiting for my bags, and my energy and enthusiasm, to arrive. Levels are fluctuating wildly: at times I feel I could collapse spontaneously. Other times, walking under the sun with Salah, I forget I'm exhausted and feel I could keep walking beside him forever. I quickly get the feeling that I don't know what I've gotten myself into.

The weather is strange. Very cold in the shade and very hot in the sun. Feels like high-altitude, but Brendan's watch says we're only several metres above sea level. The air seems thin. The sun is hot, but the air reminds you that it's only temporary. Reminds me of how they used to describe Morocco "A cold country with a warm sun." Don't mention Morocco here, I've already been criticised for using Moroccan slang.

Things I remember...

2010-02-12T21:00:00.004Z

I dread the question "what was your favourite talk?" Not because I can't decide. Because I can't remember. Something happens to me at conferences like this, I phase in and out, and I can rarely remember the specific content of the talks. (maybe this is what I meant, Emily, by "style is more influential than content.") There are a few things that stick in my mind, a few moments, but to try to remember the talk, or the exact message, impossible. The moments:

A green laser equipped to kill mosquitoes (was this real or a joke? I still don't know)

Augmented reality mapping from Microsoft (from backstage. Tom made a joke about crabs...)

The superheroes of LXD (I'm not a dancer. Anyone who has seen me dance will know how much of a dancer I am not. And yet this brought tears to my eyes. Why?)

The best coffee I've ever had.

Long Beach - I dared to venture into town for 30 minutes and suddenly realised why the conference was held here. To make sure you never left.

A free Nexus One from Google (sorry, I sold it. I need the money)

Daniel Kahneman: sometimes we experience something for no reason other than to retain the memory (is this what he was saying? This is what it made me think of). Our remembering selves vs. our experiencing selves. I often have this problem, it troubles me. I experience something and - simultaneously - think to myself "Soon, the only thing left will be my memory of it. And even that is distorted". His description of a concert reminds me of experiencing films. One false move at the end and it can ruin the entire film for me. I want to experience it purely.

Dan Barber and his love affair with a fish. (just started watching The End of The Line on tv...)

Sheryl Crow, phoning it in.

More than any of this, I remember the people. The generosity of the team behind the fellows programme. Tom, Logan, Ekeme, Simone, Sheldon. ("What do you all do for the other 51 weeks of the year?") The fellows who inspired me with their own modesty and creativity, bravery, imagination.

High school anxieties all over again. First days of school, making friends, it came flooding back to me. I thought we were supposed to grow out of this. That was the hard part. Who are you eating lunch with? We are all still young children looking for friends (or is it just me?).

Late night metal cover band in the only bar still open. I finally have a digital point-and-shoot camera (thanks you TED gift pack, wherever you are) and have dozens of blurred faces and feet hitting the pavement photos. I miss pointing and shooting. Thank you Canon.

Averaging four to five hours of sleep a night (this is my fault...)

The wisdom of the micro

2010-02-11T02:56:00.000Z

TED University, day 2. Jonathan Klein from Getty, "What makes a photograph? The viewer, not the photographer," interesting premise (like my favourite, the "Observer Principle" - your camera affects the situation in front of you, no way around it. This should be the basis of representation in documentary film and photography) but not enough new to make a huge impact. Klein misses the point. It's not about what image you choose to hang on your office wall, but how that picture was taken. He was speaking too much as a collector, not a photographer.

Cindy Gallop unveils a website that tracks micro-actions, define yourself by your actions rather than your words (no matter how small). A lot of talk about accountability in many talks here, micro-actions reminds me of Blippy (what are your friends buying?) that tracks every credit card purchase you make. A culture of full transparency and traceability. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee...

And thank you, Rob Cook, for arguing against the "singularity delusion". There will not come a time when computers overtake humans in intelligence. Why? Because we underestimate how much we don't know. As knowledge increases, so does volume of the unknown, so does uncertainty.

The incredibly talented and generous Robert Gupta brings us to tears with his story of teaching Nathaniel Ayers how to play the violin. "Music is medicine" he says, and I understand what he means. The guitar is my second therapist. Sing for my sanity.

I start drawing people on stage at the urging of Ann Willoughby - she explains switching between drawing and writing activates a left brain/right brain dialogue. It encourages creativity. I could do with more creativity lately.

Somewhere between day two and three, wondering why I'm beginning to feel increasingly alienated. Is it all this talk of success? It's a difficult word for me to hear lately. Is it the very American-nes of TED, the optimism, the support, the enthusiasm that London has somehow driven out of? What a state of affairs when optimism become alienating, but London you have done your job well, suppressing creativity and replacing optimism with fear. Anxieties. I start to consider how I might leave here and go back to London if I had to. Start to consider that I don't belong here. (Yes, this was in an email from Logan - "warning: you will likely feel like a fraud, like you don't belong. Don't listen to this voice in your head.")

I don't, in the end, look for a way to escape back to London. I stay with it after several hours. I force myself to get over the anxiety and fear. It's a powerful thing. I often try to dismiss it as an affectation, but it has more control over me than I have over it, a fact that I hate to admit but must, at times like these. Still, my challenge is to stay, to force myself to talk to people and learn from them because I know - despite how difficult it can be - that it's good for me. This isn't the place to slip into depression again. Not with so much optimism around. Not with Robert's violin and Cesar's smile and Kate's impish laugh and Tom's hand pulling me through a crowd to say hello to someone I simply must meet.

From Above Their Heads And From Beneath Their Feet

2010-02-10T13:18:00.000Z

Following my work with Angle Theatre on my first script, I was invited in February 2010 to hold a reading of a new script at the Start Night at Hampstead Theatre. Start nights offer writers a way to get some audience responses to very early drafts of new work. I like to get external reactions to my writing and films as early as possible, to see the material actuated and not just conceptual. Seeing the script on stage is completely different to reading it yourself, on a glowing computer screen, on your desk at home. It suddenly seems flawed and vulnerable.

From Above Their Heads And From Beneath Their Feet is about a father's obsessive search for contact with his son, missing for 14 years. He seeks the help of a psychic, a medium. The question remains: are his skills genuine, or just a mastery of manipulation? How far are we willing to go based simply on belief?

You will not see LA

2010-02-09T06:17:00.002Z

TED begins - we practice our talks today. It's amazing to see the range of people here, the range of ideas and disciplines. All I want to do is make films, but beside me are people like Manu - designing computers that use picolitre droplets of water as relay switches: "information is physical", and Mitch - the city of the future is "soft", and Hugo - power generation from dirt. I never intended to invent something to change the world. (Maybe, now, I should get started...)

What's my big idea? Doug wants to know. What's the core of my work? To convey it in four minutes? Everyone is struggling with the same thing. I wish I could simplify, wish I could reduce my ideas to a sentence. Others seem good at it, maybe it's the nature of your business that dictates how good you are at talking about it...

At night, welcome party. Talking to Sarah Jane about the human body in fluid motion, living under water, how we could survive (or just visit...). I didn't know there were aquanauts. There is Frederick, carrying his lab in his pocket. A microchip that offers a portable wet lab for disease diagnostics. I want to be able to carry my life's work in my pocket, pull it out and say "this is what I made."

Everyone turns in early again, 9:30pm the party clears out. The fellows in their rooms, practicing and revising their talks. I'm thinking about the next four days, I don't want to miss anything. I'm told I won't have a chance to see LA, and I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Arrival in LAX

2010-02-08T05:55:00.002Z

Finally arrived in LA for the TED conference. I had to be re-routed through San Francisco after my original (direct) flight was cancelled. Now...trying hard to stay awake...ngggggg. I don't know how I'm going to cope with this week of talks, meetings, pitches, lunches, dinners, along with this jetlag.

The Runner - latest trailer

2009-12-29T18:35:00.002Z

The latest trailer for The Runner is online now. Click here or watch it below:

The Runner starts running

2009-12-11T22:40:00.002Z

The film is finally starting to pick up real momentum. For some reason (I still can't figure out why) this film has generated much more interest - even at this early pre-production stage - than any of our previous projects.

We now have a full five-person crew to film in the Polisario camps in Algeria during the Sahara Marathon in February 2010, where Salah will be running the 10km race. We have my old friend and award-winning photographer Afshin Dehkordi, old friend and excellent photographer Jo Metson Scott, old friend and exceptional sound engineer/recordist Brendan Butler, new friend and brilliant DOP Hikaru Toda and me.

Us five in the field are joined by the invaluable Elhum Shakerifar - filmmaker and fundraiser supreme - who is, as we speak, counting the piles of money we have already to film this thing. We're turning money away, that's how good she is. Elhum is joined by the indispensable Amelia Leeson and Sarah Kent - two researchers recently added to the Tourist team. Amelia and Sarah are joined by...oh, you get the idea.

We'll have a new trailer uploaded any minute now.

Next step...we need a commission.

The Lemon Tree of Kensington

2009-10-15T01:40:00.002+01:00

Several months ago, I met with award-winning playwright Ben Ellis as he was writing his latest script for The Lemon Tree of Kensington, a play comissioned as part of the Kensington & Chelsea arts festival "Across The Street, Around The World". In 2007 Ben wrote Blindingly obvious facts about the death of Rachel Corrie. Ben wanted to meet with Arabs living in Britain to interview them about their experiences as research for his play.

I went to see the play on Wednesday of last week, October 7th, a strange experience to see some of the stories we talked about acted out on stage. The Lemon Tree of Kensington. It was a also an exercise in egotism as three others friends who had also been interviewed by Ben tried to unpack the script to see which of our stories and characteristics made it into the play. After the performance, we compared stories.

I saw the main narrative of my talk with Ben in the story of Nadia (was her name Nadia?) - her father wanted her to go into finance, she wanted to be an international news correspondent. Later in the play, another story from my life. A shopkeeper recalls a story from my own life, a story I had told Ben weeks before, a sad story of guns, Libyan politicians and innocently buying a newspaper that had happened to my father when he was on holiday with my mother in Italy. I was probably only a year or two old at the time, so I remember none of it. All I remember is my mother retelling the story to me.

Strange to see these events dramatised. Stories that are central to my own life, and shape the way I approach everything I do now, acted out on a stage for the audience.

The next phase of Shooting Back

2009-07-28T02:30:00.004+01:00

The videographers are publishing, they're making films about their lives. They're getting media coverage, now the project is public. If I hear more, if I see more links I'll post them here.

I hope I had something to offer them. I can't help thinking I wasted BT'selem's time and money by not getting into Gaza to run the workshops there. This is why they hired me in the first place. It wasn't my fault, of course, but I can't shake the feeling.

I received an answer from the GPO, about why my application for a press card was rejected. It seems - from what I understand, because all they did was quote their own list of requirements - that they weren't convinced I was there for legitimate journalistic purposes. Explain further, please...

So we want to tell stories, we want the filmmakers in Gaza and the West Bank to tell stories. They are monitors, witnesses, and maybe they want to be, can be more than that. They can be reporters, journalists, filmmakers, storytellers, whatever they choose to call themselves. The important thing is to put the power and responsibility back in their hands. Remember Issa saying "my camera is my weapon."

Second remote Gaza workshop

2009-07-11T16:00:00.002+01:00

Rif'at's film on the tunnels. He's sitting underground with the diggers, they all show their faces. He's talking directly to the camera, reporting 'from the field.' They laugh occasionally, the diggers, finding it funny that someone would be reporting from inside the tunnel, talking about them to the invisibles behind the camera.

Interview with an injured fisherman, he can't walk anymore, he sits in the corner of his room with his children in his lap.

Destruction after the war, a man described the damage done to his house. Ahmed says even animals were killed.

Testimonies about ordinary life, what about emotions? Feelings? Reactions? (maybe we need them in the videos as well)

CLIP 25: Message to the world.

These are the elements in our stories: personal introductions, coverage (visuals), interviews. Find the main subject! subject, subject, subject...

What's the main subject? If it's a family home, stay with them. Go back the next week, go back a month later.

The power in Gaza cuts. We lose video. We call Fadi on the phone, he's still there, but in the dark, they can't watch their videos any more. Put us on speaker phone - we continue the conference by telephone.

Yoav suggests smaller regular meetings, to keep the continuity of the project going. I say goodbye, hopefully next time I'll see you all in person.

Gaza Workshop - remotely

2009-07-07T14:00:00.002+01:00

When I think about it, it still makes me angry. The GPO press card was denied, but until now, no answer. No official response. Perhaps so it can be said that no, they didn't deny it, it's just taking them longer than usual to process it. Jason says they have 45 days to approve or deny an application. but I know any successful application is done in one day. Any more, and you can forget about it.

So today, on the day when I should be in Gaza running a workshop, and filming, photographing, writing, I have to instead use a faltering internet connection to talk to a group of filmmakers and citizen journalists. It takes over an hour to set up and test the connection.

Yoav calls Palnet to order an upgrade on the line to 2mb/s, but it's still not good enough. We test the line, call Fadi and the video flickers to life. A grainy face in a white room, light bleeding on to the screen from the open door behind him.

"Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Can you see me?"
"Yes."

The room fills with more videographers, the images still jumping in fits as the connection cuts in and out.

Introductions take around 40 minutes, because we can only hear and see the person sitting directly in front of the laptop. It has to be passed around to each individual. Most of them have been filming for a year or two and have already made some short films, so I'm here to review their work currently and try to encourage them to get to the next level and start thinking about short, creative, personal films.

We don't need to start from the beginning. Luckily we don't need to run technical workshops on camera use - that would be impossible by internet video. No contact. They can't see my hands waving, my gestures, I can't see their faces clearly, there's little feedback, it has to be: I talk, they listen. They talk, I listen.

All interesting stories, different trajectories somehow bringing everyone together. Here. Awatif used to work for Ramattan, but she got disheartened with daily news so she joined the project. "The news doesn't fit my personality," she told me. I often feel the same way.

Variously: "My camera is my weapon."

"Sometimes we're using the media against ourselves."

The process is frustrating, every sentence has to be repeated a few times - when the line disintegrates their faces are suddenly pixelated smears still frozen on the screen.

(Is my denial to Gaza censorship?)
(Should I appeal it?)
(I'm thinking of the wrong thing. I should be thinking about them, in Gaza, not me)

The exercises are basic, from here we can't do any practical training. I can't run through camera techniques with them, or watch their footage with them. I can't have a debate about the use of media or representation of Palestinians in the news. We're trying to discuss the theory of citizen journalism, what are the reasons for making films? Is there a purpose to this? Can any of this really make a difference? Can it influence international law?

I don't think changing international law is our responsibility as filmmakers. I think our responsibility is to tell our stories, and hopefully work on individuals. Those individuals elect their Presidents and Prime Ministers, those rulers help write the laws, they have influence, they have power and money and weapons. All we have are cameras.

Abdullah: "like anyone in Gaza, I want to show our message, how we're people, we like peace, but the situation for people in Gaza is the opposite." (Film on fishermen. "They're supposed to be free but they have a wall around them.")

Ibrahim: "so the whole world can see how we live. They can see some of us living normally."

Fatma: Arab media is under dictatorships. They still have the Ministry of Information.

"In Gaza, if one hundred kids die and five soldiers are killed, the media will say 'fighters were killed'."

Suggestions: Make a film about cultural or intellectual imperialism, against globalisation?
A Palestinian kid studying in the US?
Film about the freedom to travel?
The sea?
What's missing in your country?
Who's responsible for this?

Soussia - South Hebron Hills

2009-07-03T15:00:00.000+01:00

South Hebron Hills, farm land. Settlers surrounding Palestinian farms, and the people here don't live in houses. They have only tents, not connected to any electricity grid. This area, near Nasr's family, gets power from a wind turbine and a solar panel, no reliable power supply. (Donald MacIntyre recently wrote about them here)

I've seen a BT'selem video from here, a girl films here parents working on their land. Three settlers approach with t-shirts wrapped around their faces. One is carrying a heavy stick, and he walks quickly to the father and starts beating him. The girl panics and drops the camera. That video made it around the world, broadcast on international news stations, came to represent both the potential of the shooting back project (evidence) and the growing threat of settler extremism (violence).

A dog skips over the stones and tufts of grass that define the ground in Soussia. It's dry and rocky, no place for a farm. Look up - the roof has pieces missing, charred edges from where settlers tried to burn the place down a few weeks ago. Nasr's dog was also killed. The one outside isn't his, it must belong to someone else.

Eid, red t-shirt, one year with the BT'selem project. The camera is a weapon, he says, but it's a legitimate weapon, not forbidden, they should be afraid of the camera, not us. But some are just thugs, and they're not even afraid of the camera.

Majdi, (blue striped shirt). "The army is starting to get scared of the camera, because it gives power to the other side."

Jamal (blue eyes, check shirt) "I like anything that shows the truth of the situation."

Why do we film?
Evidence.
Show another image of Palestinians.
If the media was here they would see the truth.
We want to reach the people, not governments.
We need to understand who the Palestinians are (how images are used)
The true image is not present, it doesn't exist.

Issa (older man, not afraid) "the camera is my weapon. Even if your brother is being beaten by soldiers, don't put the camera down. He's not your brother any more, keep filming." If you stop to help him, he explains, you'll just be beaten too. Then you have two beaten Palestinians, and no evidence. Keep filming. Don't think of him as your brother anymore, think of him as evidence.

I'm surprised to hear this. Some of the group disagree, they say no, I have the right to defend myself, I'll do it, I'll put the camera down and do it. Issa says keep filming. Even if they fire tear gas at you, even if they try to shoot you. He tells the story of once holding the barrel of a soldier's gun with one hand, and his camera with the other hand. Keep filming.

There's no end to it. During the workshop, Nasr gets a call that a group of settlers has arrived at a nearby Palestinian farms. He disappears with Yoav and Assaf, both from BT'selem, to follow it up and make sure the situation is under control.

I missed a riot

2009-06-28T08:15:00.003+01:00

I'm not a very good journalist. I missed a riot. And it wasn't a very easy riot to miss, considering it happened thirty seconds from my hotel. And it happens every Saturday at around the same time.

Normally, I wouldn't be so flippant about covering a riot. I'm not an adrenaline-junkie who likes seeing people hurt and moans that there wasn't enough blood. If people are getting seriously hurt, I'm not happy. But this was a different riot. It's being called the Sabbath Wars, and is based on the fact that God said to Jerusalem's Ultra-Orthodox Jews not to open a car park on Saturday. But he did say that in response to that car par opening you could riot and burn tires and assault police.

Then, not happy just attacking police (and getting themselves hurt in the process), they attacked journalists, forcing a Channel 2 news presenter to cut short a live broadcast. That's just a step too far. I mean, attack the police all you want, but for God's sake (no pun intended) spare the journalists.

I'm starting to think the most dangerous thing about covering this conflict is not the armed violence, it's the threat of being attacked by Orthodox rioters.

Now I'm still in Jerusalem waiting for news on my press credentials. The press officer made it very clear that they don't like freelance journalists. They probably don't like Palestinian/British freelance journalists much either, but he didn't say that. He did say that my commission from the London Bureau of Reuters wasn't good enough, I had to have it commissioned through the Jerusalem office. So I called the Jerusalem office and said "you don't know me, but..." and head of the bureau said "okay, tell the London bureau to contact me and tell me who you are". He was very nice about it, actually.

So I called the London bureau, but of course my editor is away on holiday, so I had to speak to the deputy editor and say "you don't know me, but..." You get the idea. She was also very nice about it, and said yes. At least the official paperwork will be taken care of. Now it just remains for the "other stuff" to be passed. This, from what I understand, is an intense background check the GPO does before issuing press cards. This is what the foreign press liaison said he was doing at the GPO office last time I called him.

We can only wait and see...

In the meantime, I've been finding other stories in Jerusalem. Here's another series of images that was promoted to the front page of Demotix (Ultra-Orthodox won't like this one much either, I'm afraid...)

Now, another coffee...

On a hill in Hebron

2009-06-26T13:00:00.002+01:00

"Have you been to Hebron before?" Yoav asks, sitting beside me in a large transit taxi, driving out of Jerusalem.
"No,"
"You're in for a treat," he chuckles.

Everyone has heard about Hebron - the anomaly in the Palestinian/Israeli landscape. Around 600 settlers live in the centre of a city of 170,000 Palestinians. The handful of hard-core settlers are guarded in turn by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, and the centre of town - off-limits to Palestinians - is a dead zone. All the shops on the main market street are closed, shutters pulled down over doors and covered in graffiti. We drive through a series of checkpoints, but no one stops us in our taxi with yellow license plates. The roads are completely empty. We drive through H2 (the zone of Israeli settlements) to H1: the zone theoretically under Palestinian control, but still peppered with settlers in Arab houses. It's a short walk up-hill to Issa's house, but under this sun and my heavy backpack - full of my cameras and microphones - I'm struggling. I'm also out of shape, that doesn't help my endurance much.

Issa's house is being used as the headquarters of a media project supporting the use of video in monitoring human rights abuses. So far, hundreds of cameras have been handed out across the West Bank, and these hundreds of Palestinian volunteers have provided invaluable footage to international news broadcasters, as well as filmed crucial evidence for legal appeals.

Now I've been brought here to raise the skill level a little and encourage the participants to start thinking about directing their own short documentaries, representing their own lives and revealing the human details of existence to an international audience that often has little understand of the ordinary, banal, daily life of a Palestinian.

The participants here know exactly how the international news media portrays them, and what's missing in the picture.
"People don't understand us, they don't see us as human beings."
So we talk about simple stories. Your family. Your neighbours. What it's like getting water from the well every morning. What it's like farming next to a settlement every day. Very simple stories, the sort of thing many of the participants would just overlook, but exactly the kind of stories that people outside Palestine need to see to understand the humanity of the situation.

It's not a easy project, and this isn't an easy idea to sell to everyone. Fadi leans forward, resting his elbows on his legs, and scowls at the group. He's a big guy, tall and wide. Even with a baby face, and his round bald head, he can still look intimidating. Fadi volunteered for the project, and he's enthusiastic about filming, but he's also angry.
"Why should we film? What's the point? Am I going to open a case against the Israeli courts? Then what happens? Nothing. If my son is being beaten, what am I going to do, just sit back and film it?"

Good question, of course. I'm not here to convince anyone that this project is going to save their lives and end the occupation, and I tell them that. I'm not here to tell them to stop everything and just film from now on, and I'm definitely not asking them to put themselves in danger to get evidence. But, amidst the politics and violence here, in the middle of all the pressures and strains, there is suddenly a very small possibility for Palestinians to take ownership over their own representation for once, to tell their own stories rather than having them told for them.

It's a tiny gesture: pick up a camera and film. But it can have massive consequences. I talk about how the footage is broadcast around the world. I talk about how much support the project has in the UK. I talk about the capacity of the participants to tell a story that no one would otherwise ever hear.

I realise quickly that I don't need to tell them all this, because there are others in the group already convinced of the project's potential. They tell Fadi their own stories. They describe what they filmed and what it feels like to finally hold a crucial piece of evidence when, for so long, the Israeli police and courts have asked - in answer to any complaints - "where's the evidence."

But I also know my limitations. "You know better than me what your lives are like. I can only tell you how to use this camera, where your footage goes, and what impact it can have. The rest is up to you."

"But we know the media is controlled by Zionists" they complain. It's an oversimplification I hear over and over again in Palestine, and I'm sick of hearing it. Not only because it isn't strictly true (the media is controlled by capitalists...) but because it's a phrase often used over and over again just to absolve us of our responsibilities.

"Whoever controls the media," I answer, "Maybe this is your chance to take back some of that control..."

First day of training

2009-06-24T17:52:00.005+01:00

I spent Tuesday in a town near Nablus, running a preliminary training workshop with a media NGO here (I'll give the details once I leave..) Hundreds of cameras were distributed around the West Bank as part of a programme to document human rights abuses and so far it's been a huge success, footage broadcast around the world on international news channels. Now I've been hired to run a few workshops and training sessions - a review for some and an introduction to those who have just picked up their cameras for the first time. We're aiming to bring the skill level up a notch, to facilitate them eventually making their own short films.

There are several brave families in the room. Husbands and wives, some young children, all of them volunteered for the programme because they could both see the value of it, and wanted the feeling of having a role in documenting their own lives. Tired of seeing the news and finding so may holes in the representation of Palestinian lives. Tired of taking their cases to court only to be told "where's the evidence?" Now they have evidence. Things won't change overnight, but at the least the possibility for a video camera to empower these families is promising.

Bassam, on the right in the photograph, never used a camera before. He came to the workshops because a friend told him about it, and he liked the idea of documenting what he was going through in his village of 'Aqraba. 144,000 Dunums of farm land, it's on the border with the Jordan Valley, and as the whole of the Jordan Valley is under military law (far more strict than that in the West Bank) the authorities keep creeping into 'Aqraba. They restrict the movement of 'Aqraba farmers, they take a little more land, they take a little more water, they suddenly designate an area as a closed military zone. Things are getting worse, Bassam explains.

Maybe the cameras can help...

Back in Jersualem

2009-06-22T20:54:00.002+01:00

This is the fastest I've ever made it through Israeli security. Face freshly-shaven. Shirt, tucked in. Papers all in order. I sat for only ten minutes, they called me into the security office next to the immigration window. They welcomed me back, said they knew I'd been there many times before as a journalist, and said they wanted to get me through as fast as possible. They and asked a few simple questions.
What are you here for?
Reporting on the reconstruction in Gaza.
With who?
Reuters.
Who's your contact in Gaza?
UNRWA.

That was it. Gave them some phone numbers, and walked out - even finding my luggage still by the carousel - to meet Dori in the cafe with green chairs (we always meet in the cafe with green chairs. Although this time I went to the wrong cafe. Apparently all the cafes here have green chairs.)

I haven't seen Dori in a few years. What's new? He finally finished renovating his house. He's a grandfather - his daughter has a one year old she called Ariel, after the Little Mermaid (not Sharon). He's started driving medical school exams between the students and professors for money, apparently it pays quite well. They trust him not to look at the questions. He asks where I'm going and I tell him West Bank for a week, then Gaza.

"Oh, Gaza. Make sure you wear PRESS on your back all the time, one of our snipers might see you and know you're not from Gaza and shoot you."
"okay..."

I'm exhausted, having had too much coffee trying to stay awake. It's not working. So I'll give in and go to sleep...

Demonstration at Iranian embassy, London

2009-06-14T22:36:00.002+01:00

Following the alleged electoral fraud in Iran, protesters gathered in front of the Iranian embassy in London to demonstrate. My photos of the event made the front page of the Demotix website.

(Not sure how long it'll stay up there...so catch it while you can. If you miss it on the front page, my personal page is here.

In other news, I'm working on a lesson plan for a series of workshops I'll be holding in the West Bank and Gaza for media workers, to develop the use of video in online citizen journalism and human rights monitoring. More details to come...

Egyptian bloggers: kidnapped and tortured

2009-06-10T01:05:00.002+01:00

You may have read earlier about the time I spent waiting in Cairo for Laila El Haddad so we could both cross into Gaza together to work on a media training project. That never happened.

But while I was in Cairo, I managed to trace four Egyptian bloggers recently allegedly kidnapped and tortured by state security officials. They have all since been released, but their stories - and the revelation that government officials are virtually immune from prosecution - make for some very disturbing news.

I originally made the film for Al-Jazeera English's Focus on Gaza programme, but while in the middle of the final cut, the programme was suddenly cancelled, so the film is now looking for a new home (most probably in a slightly different form).

If you've read this far, and you're still interested, you deserve a sneak peak. This is a link to a rough preview, and you'll need the password "bloggers".

Let me know if you have any ideas...

Hard Time Killing Floor

2009-06-03T02:29:00.003+01:00

A few months ago, I (very much by surprise, and sort of by accident) became a playwright when my script Hard Time Killing Floor - about a Turkish/British man returning to London after awaiting execution in a Turkish prison for 12 years - was selected for the Angle Theatre's New Writer's season at the Hackney Empire.

I'd like to extend and invitation to everyone to the first public reading of my play on June 7th:

"Hard Time Killing Floor"
Hackney Empire Studio
291 Mare Street, London E8 1EJ
Sunday, June 7, 4:30 pm
Tickets are free but you should book through the season producer Amelia Nicholson.
Her email is amelia@iceni-productions.com

For details of the venue, click here

HARD TIME KILLING FLOOR
A man returns to London after serving twelve years in a Turkish prison awaiting execution. We don't see the crime and we don't see the violence - only the consequences of both. The question is not one of guilt or innocence, but of the process of putting your life back together after being released and allowed to return home. Things are no longer in perspective. The man can't see his friends and family - let alone himself - in the same way, and there are some questions that he can't answer.

Hope to see you there, and please feel free to let anyone else know who you think might be interested...

I See The Stars At Noon screening in London...

2009-05-07T12:04:00.003+01:00

Our first documentary, I See The Stars At Noon, is still (thankfully) being screened five years after it was made. Next week it's screening as part of the excellent installation Leaving Room, by artists Roberto Cavallini and Daniele Rugo at Goldsmiths University in London. The screening is free, and there's a Q&A with director Saeed Taji Farouky following the screening.

5-7pm, Small Cinema, Main Building, Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross. To find the university, visit their site here
Screening of:

Sin Papeles | Sam Stevens, 2005
I see the stars at noon | Saeed Taji Farouky, 2005

Followed by a conversation between: Roberto Cavallini, Saeed Taji Farouky, Daniele Rugo and Sam Stevens

Free entrance, no reservations needed.

For more info about the film makers:

http://www.samuelstevens.eu/

http://www.touristwithatypewriter.com/

For more info about the project:

http://bisproject.org/leavingroom/

Tourist admits defeat (don't expect it to happen again...)

2009-04-16T10:43:00.004+01:00

After ten days of waiting (it seems like longer) I've finally been urged to, and have painfully agreed to, admit defeat in the face of the Rafah border. All indications are that there's "no way" I'll be allowed in (that's a direct quote from Cairo's Ramattan Bureau. They were very helpful in offering advice and paperwork and contacts, but ultimately couldn't do anything more for me)

It was very bad timing, after all, nothing more dramatic than a series of separate incidents that all combined to make the crossing virtually impossible for me. First, Laila El-Haddad was refused entry to Egypt and detained in Cairo airport for 36 hours (sleeping on the floor with her two children, aged 4 and 1). Laila's a Gaza resident, so at least that would have made it easier for us both to get across Rafah (which is typically only for Palestinian residents, but during the war in January was open for a while for international journalists, and is still occasionally open for delegations).

Then, an undercover Hezbullah sleeper cell was apparently discovered operating in Egypt. That accusation alone would have been bad enough to close the border, if Nasrallah hadn't admitted it was true two days later...

So, with these factors piling up, crossing the Rafah border was becoming more and more difficult. Then the Egyptian Government Press Office announced it was no longer issuing papers to foreign journalists crossing into Rafah, and THEN the British Consulate announced it was no longer even issuing papers absolving itself of all responsibility for UK journalists wanting to cross! They can't even commit enough to sign a piece of paper saying I can't sue them if I die? Things are getting really bad...

By that point, it seemed the only people being allowed through Rafah were injured Palestinians getting medical treatment in Egypt or returning home to Gaza. As dedicated as I am to my work, I'm (only slightly) above pretending to be an injured Palestinian.

Oh, and a few bright sparks also pointed out that even if I did get it, it might be difficult to...what was it again? Oh, that's right. Get out.

Luckily, in the meantime, I've managed to take my stress and boredom and frustration and make another film while waiting. Of course I can't tell you anything about until I leave Egypt, otherwise it wouldn't be any fun, (and probably not a very good documentary if it was done with the approval of the Egyptian state)

Laila back in the US

2009-04-10T13:07:00.001+01:00

The latest news is that Laila finally arrived back in the US at 3am this morning, after a transfer through London. I haven't heard directly from her yet, but will let you know when I do...

Laila living in Cairo Airport

2009-04-08T18:49:00.004+01:00

Laila has now been in Cairo International Airport for 20 hours, sleeping and eating on the floor with her two kids, aged five and one and a half. After hours of arguing, the guards are now telling her nothing. Instead, they're just stalling - telling her something's happening, someone's coming to see her, a decision is coming soon. But they don't seem to know what happened to her file.

She's still not being given access to a phone, and is eating the food she brought with her and donations from the airport staff.

The whole thing is looking like a maze of bureaucracy and illogical arbitrary rules, with her and her kids trapped in the middle.

One of the guards just asked her if she wants him to put up a shelter for her, so she has the feeling she's going to be there for a lot longer...

At the moment, I don't know what else to do. Myself, her husband and father have been calling and appealing to everyone we can think of. Politicians, journalists, NGOs, diplomats - even with some high-up connections, nothing seems to be making a difference.

http://twitter.com/Gazamom

Laila in the Airport

2009-04-08T15:47:00.004+01:00

Laila arrived in Cairo at around 11:30 last night, but since then has been detained by security with her two children, Yousuf age 5 and Noor age 15 months. She's been there for 17 hours so far, and they've given her no access to a telephone. She managed to find a wireless signal in the room and has been keeping in touch with her family and I for hours, but the latest news is that they intend to send her back to the US because orders for all Palestinians to be refused entry unless Rafah crossing is open.

I'll keep you posted as more information comes in...

Back in Cairo

2009-04-07T16:38:00.001+01:00

I'm back in Cairo after only a few weeks away. (I had a feeling I'd be back so soon...)

At the moment Laila El-Haddad in on her way over (I think she's still airborne at this moment) and when we meet here, we'll start planning for Gaza. At the moment, I have no idea what the situation is with the border, when/if it will open, how/if I can get through as a journalist. I'm hearing completely different stories from different sources. The British Embassy says they have nothing to do with crossing any more - they don't provide any letters or paperwork. The Egyptian Journalists Union were providing press passes during and just after the war, but now they say go to your embassy...

UNRWA says it should be no problem going through Rafah with a commission letter from a news media.

I think we'll just end up going to the border on a rumour and taking our chances...

We are the future

2009-03-26T11:57:00.001Z

In order to keep up with the future and secure our place in it, we've signed up to Twitter. Wow. Amazing. It is indeed a revolution.

I'm sure there's a way of linking Twitter here...
But in the meantime, find us here

Cairo and Cairo again

2009-03-26T11:25:00.002Z

FROM: Saeed Taji Farouky
Sorry, we disappeared for a while there. But that doesn't mean we haven't been busy (double negative...in other words, we've been busy)

Gareth and I just got back from Cairo where we filmed and researched (very quickly) a five and a half minute film for Al-Jazeera English's new programme Empire. The programme is an hour-long round table discussion on empires, power structures, imperialism, etc and this latest episode was about Arab unity (or the lack of).

We were asked to make a film about the Arab League and how it's faired in the past dealing with regional issues itself, without foreign help. What we found was that, not surprisingly, it hasn't done well. In fact, we would call it a failure.

This was a challenging film, we haven't made anything like it in the past. Very research heavy, relying on a lot of library footage, and most importantly VERY opinionated. It was definitely a relief to be able to say things like "The Arab solution was a failure" as an opinion, without having to write a 2000 word article on why it was a failure. So hopefully someone believes my opinion...

The show aired last night (March 25th) and should be online soon on Al-Jazeera's youtube page We'll let you know...

In the meantime, I'm back in Cairo around the 6th of April on my way to Gaza to implement a video and blog-based human rights monitoring project in Gaza (more about that later). I'm planning to make a few more films - hopefully with Gareth involved - while I'm there. Any idea? Let us know...

Last Days

2008-04-07T22:54:00.004+01:00

My time here is almost up. But I know I'll be back. Zlatko has already asked me to come back in August for another film. There's still a lot to be done, still many refugees, rebels still hiding in the jungle, crouching over their ancient Kalashnikovs in the rain, still political prisoners like Hussein Radjabu serving 13 years in prison, still a parliament paralysed by confusion.

There's one last thing tomorrow. One final scene to film before I leave. It is, perhaps, the most obvious scene, in a film about landmine clearance. But as yet, it hasn't happened. It almost happened today, but it was delayed. I'm talking about an explosion. Yes, I still haven't seen an explosion. It should be the highlight of the trip, but so far - maybe because there aren't so many landmines even remaining in Burundi - I still haven't seen it. I'm talking about an intentional explosion, not an accidental explosion - that would be terrible. No, controlled demolition of abandoned mines, one electrical spark setting off a chain reaction that takes, Zlatko tells me, one hundred-thousandth of a second to complete.

This is, incidentally, about the same amount of sleep I get every night. Pure coincidence.

Dancing at Archipel

2008-04-03T22:59:00.000+01:00

Alain and I leave the base at around 1am, we’re driving to Archipel, a club that Zlatko recommended to me while laughing, embarrassed, to himself. “It’s ridiculous,” he said “you just look at a girl and she’s all over you. It’s really...what’s the word...indiscrete. She’s touching herself and rubbing herself all over you.”

As we turn out of the FSD compound, the headlights of the car catch rows of long horn cattle in the road. Dozens of cows, trudging slowly up the main road towards us, in complete darkness and silence. “Oh my goodness, what is happening?” Alain says aloud. I can only laugh.

“At this time?” He’s already a bit drunk. I didn’t realise when I first got in the car with him, but he soon explains he’s been drinking whiskey with his parents. He stops to wind down the window and ask the farmer what’s going on. Further ahead, we see a heard of sheep, also heads bobbing, feet clicking on the asphalt. “They’re going to the Vice President’s house,” Alain explains, “because they heard that the FNL was going to steal their animals. They came from Ruigi, they started walking here at 3pm.”

For ten hours, they’ve been walking on the road, moving their animals to the only safe place they can think of – the Vice President’s house in the capital. I picture them camped outside this door, exhausted, pleading for protection.

At Archipel, men are stumbling outside drunk and aggressive. Alain’s been talking about money on the drive here, that someone was offering him 200 dollars a month to work for them. He can make that much in a week, he says. He writes one article for a hundred dollars, he says. I can’t help wondering if this is his drunken way of telling me how much money he expects when it comes time to pay him at the end of our three weeks together. “I’m not doing this for the money” he said at the time, when I asked him what his rate was. “Give me what you can,” and I told him I didn’t have much money.

There is one dimly lit dance floor in the centre of the club, everything else is so dark I can only see vague shapes moving around. Some of the shapes are couples dancing energetically, others are just stumbling around drunk. Alain points out several Burundian celebrities and government ministers. There’s an older French man in the corner, leaning on a tiny, thin Burundian girl who laughs and touches him on the shoulder. Outside, there are hookers lining the walls and talking to anyone who walks by. Inside, they’re girlfriends for hire, Alain explains. They’re not prostitutes, but they’ll ask you for money. I don't understand the difference. It reminds me of the girlfriends for hire in Morocco, and the old, French men in bars, also leaning on thin little girls.

Alain and I are moving lazily to the music with a friend of his, when a girl who looks only 16 or 17 walks over and puts her arms around me, says her name is Melissa. “It’s okay,” Alain tells me.
"French or English?" she asks
"Uh...English."
She smells of alcohol, asks me to buy her a beer. This is uncomfortable. She pulls me close and puts her legs between mine, grinding to the music. She rubs her hands hard over my chest and strokes my beard and keeps trying to pull my head to hers to kiss me. It's fun for a while - and even funny - and I’m dancing, doing my best to enjoy it. But after a few minutes it just become depressing. It's too much. I try to push away from Melissa, but it’s literally impossible. She's wrapped around me tightly, and without aggressively shoving her across the room, there's nothing I can do but play this game of trying to keep my distance and looking anywhere but at her face. She tries again to rub up against me and grabs my hand to move them over her body, I'm fighting against it, and we're wrestling like that in the corner of the dance floor. She’s asks me to buy her a drink again, she tries to hold my hand again. This is getting tedious now. Finally she tells me "I'm going home" - and I just say okay, and feel relieved that she's gone. I look at Alain and laugh.

This is what Zlatko was talking about.

Soon after, one of Alain’s friends is dancing with us. She’s very beautiful and seems to know Alain well - she's not young and desperate like Melissa. I never got her name. She looks elegant in a tight black and white dress, and she isn’t afraid to dance with Alain and I. All around me, people are crushing against each other, sweating in the humid and hot night. Men are pulling young girls closer, women are rubbing themselves against their boys. No one is embarrassed. If you want to dance with someone, pull them closer and put your arms around them. If they like it, they’ll stay. If not, they’ll move away. No one pretends that they're not looking, or not interested, or that they don't want to touch.

At first, I’m uncomfortable holding Alain’s friend so close, I think if I put my hand here, or move like this, she’ll think I’m a pervert and slap me. But, quickly, I understand what’s going on here. It’s something we should all understand, it’s something so simple. Everyone’s enjoying themselves. The girl may not know me, but she knows Alain, so maybe she trusts me, and if it feels good to have a stranger hold you close and move his hips with yours, then why not do it. She smells of sweat and shampoo. Her dress is soaked in sweat, but it doesn’t bother me tonight. I like it. The whole club smells like this, and it’s a hot and sexual smell.

Sometimes, I move away but Alain’s friend pulls me closer. Other times, she moves away and I pull her closer.

My Lungs About to Burst

2008-04-03T22:49:00.002+01:00

I wake up early this morning, after very little sleep last night from editing. I’m ready to fall asleep in the car, but the drive to Bubanza is so beautiful I don’t want to miss it. Green, smooth hills and mountains. All lush countryside. A warm breeze brushes my eyes. For a moment I forget how exhausted I am that I’m so tired. On the hike down to the site – a suspected unexploded rocket - my legs are shaking. I haven’t been hiking in years, and carrying my equipment every day I feel like I’ve been working out regularly, so all my muscles are already tired. The ground is loose and very steep, sometimes I have to jump over a few rocks or slide down a few feet of mud.

We stop, Didier tells me looking at his GPS, only 650m from the car, but the hike down makes it feel more like a few kilometres. The team sets up their base near a collection of stone houses, a few metres above the suspected field. I haul a fragmentation protection jacket over my head, strap it around my waist and through my legs with the help of Pontien. I pull a helmet and mask over my face.

Digging through the field, following the squeals of their metal detectors, the team finds fragments of the rocket, already exploded, so they can now declare the field as safe.

In this case, the farmer decided to use his land anyway, even before knowing whether it was safe or not. In many other cases, though, the fear of a mine or unexploded ordnance is enough to keep people away from their precious land. Burundi is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, and every square inch of land is used. Yesterday, I saw a family collecting plants from in between the stones in the perking area of the FSD base.

After several hours in the sun, my skin is burning, and I’m sweating heavily under all the protective clothing. Now we have to hike back up. I didn’t expect it to be so hard. I’m immediately out of breath and my lungs are in pain, they feel like they’re about to burst. Several times, I feel like I might actually collapse. I’m dehydrated, and not in shape, my lungs burning painfully. At over 2000m, a deep breath feels like I’m just wheezing, barely getting enough oxygen. I keep repeating to myself “smooth...calm...“ with each step, just to stop me from getting frustrated and tense and losing hope. I look at the ground, watching my feet with each step, rather than looking at the steep, loose path ahead. I can hear local children laughing and running around behind me. They’re wearing only flip-flops or barefoot. I remember when I was climbing mount Toubkal in crampons, having to kick every step into the thick snow, and thinking that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I think this beats Toubkal. At least in Toubkal I could rest when I wanted, I was climbing alone, but here I had to keep up with the rest of the group. I have to stop myself from looking up, because I knew as soon as I see the vehicles, my legs will collapse.

Stumbling to our jeep, I sit in the shade, sweat covering my face and hair, I can’t even sit down I’m so exhausted and short of breath. I’m sipping air through a straw. I suck sugar water from the strands of a chunk of sugar cane that Gabriel hands me, just to get some hydration and energy back.

From Bugume, we drive to Kayanaga where Pontien and Aaron talk to locals who say they discovered several unexploded mines. With their white Jeeps, equipment, walkie-talkies, and my two cameras, the group attracts a large crowd. Soon, kids are screaming and running around us so fiercely Dider has to ask them all to shut up so we can hear the old man describing the mines he says he found. Joseph is short, wearing a ripped tank top that barely hangs over his bony frame. He wears a rough grisly beard. I can’t understand him as he describes the mine to Theo in Kirundi, but he moves around so energetically, acting out the shape of the mine, and the accident that happened in December. At one point, after one of his short stories, everyone around him laughs. Didier and I look at Theo for an explanation, and he tells us “he was describing an accident where a man lost his testicles.”

Theo and Didier follow their incident map closer to the site of the suspected mines, and along the way they meet the local army commander, Seargent Major Theodore Ndikumana. Several accidents have already been reported here, with old and forgotten fragmentation mines surrounding the military base.

I’m so tired and hungry I want to cry. We stop in a room, a store room, with one bulb in the centre, sacks of grain stacked in the corner. I eat fried Makaki fish and friend banana, all wrapped in banana leaves and heated over open coals outside, as I watch the eight police men – our security escort – getting drunk on local Primus beer.

We Never Thought It Could Happen To Us

2008-03-31T00:19:00.000+01:00

Zlatko reads the daily incident report from the UN, reading about Bubanza province where we’re supposed to be travelling tomorrow. He’s been waiting for the UN to promise at least one open-top pickup truck full of police to, at the least, make any armed bandits think twice before attacking us. So far, they haven’t agreed, so his project in Bubanza has been delayed.
He reads down the list of attacks.
“8pm. This one’s in Bubanza. A group of armed bandits broke into a family home, throwing a grenade and killing three members. 6am, armed bandits stop a bus on the road and rob the occupants of mobile phones and wallets.”

I continue reading down the list over his shoulder. One family was attacked and killed, in another grenade attack, because the bandits suspected a member of the family of “witchcraft”. The violence seems completely unpredictable, and illogical.

Zlatko cross-checks each report with a map of Bubanza province, to see how close each attack is to his team’s proposed route and area of operations.

The violence is unpredictable, but one thing remains consistent. Even after the horrors of genocide that this country has been through, even after the sickening associations with the names “Hutu” and “Tutsi” that make me cringe to hear them, the division remains. People still refer to one or the other. I remember David Niyonzima writing “Unlocking the Horns” about reconciliation in Burundi, when he said that before Belgian colonisation, no one here knew what it meant to be Hutu or Tutsi.

Last night, Zlatko and I were discussing the war in Bosnia again (I still have a lot to learn about it). He explained that when the war started and reports would come in that the Serbs had attacked here, or the Croats had attacked there, him and his friends would listen in confusion. He comes from Tusla, a town famously well integrated between Serbs, Croats and Muslim. The town’s mayor was even nominated for a Nobel Peace prize for his efforts in keeping his community together during the worst violence. But when they heard the news during the day, Zlatko and his friends would meet later that night in a bar to ask each other,
“’What are you? Are you a Serb?’ Are you a Croat?” We didn’t know,” he explains to me, “We had no idea what it meant to be a Serb or a Croat or even Muslim. Today, when I think about it, maybe 95 percent of my friend in Tusla are Muslims, but I didn’t even think about it at the time. I didn’t even know what it meant! And my friend would go ask his parents, and he would come back the next day saying ‘Well, my parents told me that we’re Serbs.’ If we heard on the radio that the Serbs had just attacked somewhere, he would be embarrassed. If you were in a mixed marriage - and my wife is from a mixed marriage but it didn’t mean anything before – suddenly your wife’s family would look at you suspiciously. We never thought it could happen to us. Especially in Tusla. We never believed it could happen, but it happened.”

I thought about this today, as Alain was explaining to me the news that morning. The President, a Hutu, had ordered the demobilisation of a number of army officers, all Tutsi. The President being a Hutu, people saw it as an attempt to either rebalance the army (if you’re a Hutu) or imbalance the army (if you’re a Tutsi). For years, the army has been dominated by Tutsis. After all, the 1993 coup - and the subsequent vengeful killing of Hutus by the army and their proxies - was made possible because of the Tutsi control over the army. The Vice President, a Tutsi, disagreed with the President’s decree, but here it looks like that doesn’t count for much.

At the same time, FNL leaders – Hutus - are in Tanzanian preparing to meet with the government – dominated by a Hutu party - to finalise a peace deal. Today, they’re still waiting for the government to guarantee them immunity from arrest and prosecution before they set foot in Burundian soil.

Over in Zimbabwe, “the people have won” they said.

We Are All God's Children

2008-03-28T19:22:00.004Z

Early morning, and we leave the hotel at 8am. The air is cold up here at 2000m as we drive through the pine mountains of Bururi. The mist is still seeping along the road. Zlatko is analysing the convoy, because this is the area where a previous FSD convoy was attacked three weeks ago.
“Tell the first car to move forward a bit,” he tells Mathius in the back seat, who is communicating with the rest of the team by radio. “And tell the next two vehicles to move closer together.”
The first two cars are carrying armed policemen. To be honest, they don’t look to me like highly trained soldiers, but they’re better than nothing. Usually, just the sight of a group of police with AK-47s is enough to scare bandits off, many of whom may have only one gun between them, the rest just carrying machetes.

At some point, around half way through the journey, we turn off the main road and onto a bright red dirt track that brings is straight through tiny, straw hut villages and town markets. People stare as the convoy of five white vehicles, antennas waving, sprints past. We are heading this morning to a series of electricity pylons to do a final visual check of FSD’s work. They've already cleared the pylons of several fragmentation mines, originally planted by the Burundian Army to keep FNL rebels from sabotaging the power lines. But since the start of the war 13 years ago, the mines have been forgotten, abandoned, and eventually the national electricity company Regideso called FSD to clear the area and allow their workers to get back to essential maintenance work.

We park the jeeps on the tarmac road and the team collects their equipment, as children nearby sit and stare in amazement. The policemen just hang around, disinterested.

With everything in hand, the team steps off the road, onto a dirt track, into the bush. At such high altitude, even this little hike, with all my gear, leaves me gasping for breath and dripping in sweat. At the top of the path, the team sets up a camp and gets dressed in their protective gear, flak jacket and protective helmet. They tune their metal detectors, and return to the paths around the pylons.

I ask Gabriel why he does this dangerous work. “Because I want to help my brothers and sisters in Burundi,” he tells me.

When the work is finished, and we’re all back down on tarmac with the Land Rovers, it starts to rain. Just a trickle, at first, but then the warm, thick rain of the tropics. Some of the team stand under it, it’s so relaxing, rather than take shelter in the jeeps. Gabriel shares around some Kasava that he found while working, and we all take bites. The team is laughing and relaxed after a tough day. I practice more words in Kurundi.

As Gabriel offers me another piece of Kasava, he asks “Where are you from originally?” in his very specific and clipped vocabulary.
“Palestine.”
“Ah, Palestine!” he says knowingly. “We hear about Palestinians fighting with the Israelis every day here. Whey can’t they live together in peace? I have heard that they say that this conflict is in the Bible. Is it true? And that it will end when Jesus returns to earth?”
“No. There are stories about it in the Bible, but the real conflict is political.”
“Ah, okay. I have heard also that the Israelis and the Palestinians are brothers, is this true?”
“Yes, I think so.” I want to compare the situation to this country - The FNL, a Hutu military group, is fighting the government, now also run by Hutus – but I’m not sure that the analogy is right and I don’t want to say anything insensitive.

Later that night, Gabriel tells me 23 members of his family were killed in the violence of 1993, including his father, his brother and his uncle. He sees the look of shock on my face, and answers as only someone who has been saturated by such violence can: “But this is normal! This is just something that happened...” He was at the University of Kibima in Kitanga when around 150 of his classmates were burned in a petrol station.

But even Gabriel, a well-educated and sensible man, has his own version of history. Everyone here has their own version of history. The violence of 1993 was sparked after the country’s first democratically elected president – a Hutu - was assassinated by the Tutsi-led army. Hutus took revenge on a mass scale against any Tutsi they could find. In return, the Tutsi-dominated army, with proxy Tutsi killers of their own, slaughtered tens of thousands of Hutus in further revenge. But Gabriel still tells the same story those Tutsi killers told 15 years ago – those were only a few deaths, regrettable accidents that occurred during military operations in response to Hutu violence around the country. It was not a policy of killing, he insists, there were not tens of thousands of Hutus murdered, he tells me.

When I ask if he is a Tutsi or a Hutu, he laughs, just as Alain laughed when I asked him casually over lunch a few days ago. It’s still an awkward question to ask, and I think Alain and Gabriel were only laughing out of politeness. “ I will tell you,” he said, “but I also want to say that I don’t like to make these divisions. I believe in God, and I believe we are all in God’s image so we should not make these ethnic divisions between us...”

The Mountains

2008-03-27T18:58:00.002Z

In the afternoon, I finally leave the centre of Bujumbura as we drive in convoy to the province of Bururi. Some areas there are still threatened by FNL, the last armed rebel group holding out for a separate peace. Zltko spent the morning meeting with the UN, trying to arrange a security convoy for the group after one of his teams was attacked by an armed ambush two weeks ago on a similar route. That time, a bullet pierced the vehicle’s radiator and skimmed one of the de-miners’ skulls. He went to hospital with only slight injuries – that time he was lucky, but Zlatko was furious. The UN wasn’t offering his team daily incident reports, so he had no idea that route was dangerous, and now the UN was refusing to arrange a security convoy for the next trip. Maybe they couldn’t be bothered, maybe they didn’t like giving the impression that the country wasn’t safe.

As soon as we leave the Bujumbura city limits, we climb into the mountains of Burundi. I soon understand why they used to call this country “the Switzerland of Africa.” It’s high altitude pine forests, and thin cool mountain air. I remember my family holidays in Switzerland when I was 12 or 13. The air is thin, it gets harder to breathe as we approach 2000m. The roads are lined with coffee plants, piles of wood burning for charcoal, papaya plants. It’s hot, despite the cold mountain air. Rain comes in for a few seconds, then dissipates.

We pass crowds of Burundians, walking through markets, stacked between the dirt road and the soaring mountains behind them. There are misty green forests all around us, and crowds of excitable children staring at the convoy, waving passionately and yelling “Muzungo! Muzungo!”. Zlatko laughs every time. “Yes, here I am. I am the Muzungo!”
I practice my Kirundi with Mathias in the back seat. “I learned this the other day: ‘sin do Muzungo. Do Muarabo!” I am not a white man, I’m an Arab. Mathias laughs with approval.
“What’s the difference?” Zlatko asks. He puts his arm next to mine as he holds the steering wheel. His skin is tanned, and darker than mine.

I tried to convince a nurse the other day that I was half African. “My mother is Egyptian,” I told her. But she laughed off my explanation. If you’re not black, you’re a Muzungo.

The drive is long – we son get bored. I ask Zlatko to give me a brief history – once again – of the Balkan wars. “Don’t worry,” he reassures me, “Even Bosnian’s find it complicated,” and he tells me the story of the day his city of Tusla came under attack from the Serbs. Despite being a Bosnian Serb himself, he joined the local militia to defend the Muslims, and defend his town. For months, they didn’t trust him, he says, “I knew there was always someone at my back with a gun, ready to kill me.” But he soon proved himself, and he rose through the ranks of the once-guerrilla army to become a counter-intelligence officer. When he would return home from the front every few months, his villagers would throw him a welcome party, offering what little they had as gifts.

We reach Bururi by 5:30pm, here to do quality assurance on the latest phase of FSD’s mine clearance operation. We order brochettes for dinner, and I have to accept that I’ll be eating meat for the first time in maybe 18 months. There’s nothing else available. With a local Primus beer, I sit with Zlatko and his Burundian team in the tin-roofed back room of the restaurant, one naked light bulb above our heads and a tropical rain splashing down outside the glassless window. Near the end of the night, an older man leans over to Gabriel, one of the team members, and says something as he motions to Zlatko. Gabriel translates in very polite, accented English.
“He says he is surprised to see a white man sitting with him and drinking and eating normally.”
“Tell him,” Zlatko replies, “there is no difference between him and me except for a little more pigment in his skin.” Gabriel translates. The older man nods in agreement, and stands up to shake Gabriel’s hand, then Zlatko’s hand, with a smile.

“You know,” Gabriel continues, “because we had colonialism here and it was very bad. It meant white men would sit alone and separate from black men. So for this man to see you sitting here with us and sharing food with us is very special.”

Burundi

2008-03-24T21:10:00.005Z

It's been five days so far in Bujumbura. This is my first experience of Central Africa, and the first time I've been south of the Sahara since South Africa, when I was still only a little boy (now a big boy), in 1994.

The nights are hot and humid, geckos are climbing the walls. In the mornings, I look out of my window and see mist over the mountains. I can hear the sound of tropical birds. It's already warm by 8am, and I climb out from under my mosquito net, still drowsy after some very vivid dreams brought on, I think, by malaria medication.

I'm here to cover a landmine clearance operation, one that - when completed within the next two months - will make Burundi the first 100% landmine free country in the world. Burundi, as tiny and internationally obscure as it is, has its own horrific past of genocide and civil war. One thing it doesn't need now is landmines and unexploded ordnance littering the country. Violence continues despite a 2000 ceasefire and the parliament has been paralysed for over two months after Alice Nzumokunda - the head of the ruling party CNDD-FDD - was dismissed for "undisclosed" reasons.

I interviewed the new head of CNDD-FDD, Colonel Jeremie Ngendakumana, and asked him directly why Alice was removed from office.

He smiled and said "This is internal party matters, I don't think it is right to discuss it with people outside of the party."

The Colonel had, so far, refused to discuss his party's reasons with anyone in Burundi, neither journalist or non-party member. "But everyone in the party knows why," he assured me. This wasn't a good answer from a Colonel, in a country accustomed to military coups, who is now being accused of being a dictator.

Christmas Songs

2007-12-28T01:02:00.000Z

We are invited to Campbell's for Christmas dinner. His entire family is there, all 21 of them (with Robert and I added as last-minute guests), too big to fit in their home, so they rent out an entire bed-and-breakfast for themselves. They are, on the surface, a typical mid-west family: sweet, polite, apple pie and gingham shirts. Campbell's grandparents introduce themselves: "I'm grandma," his grandmother chirps and shakes my hand. "And I'm grandpa!" his grandfather chimes excitedly. It's all so sweet and bible-belt looking it's easy to forget these people are actually fairly radical pacifists, many of them willing to break federal law to help "fugitives" escape from the U.S. military.

My first impression of the sweet, harmless family is quickly shattered when we start talking about international politics. There aren't many Mid-west Christian families who can talk confidently about Palestine and Israel, some of them from first-hand experience having worked there in peace-making and human rights teams.
"What do you think of this Annapolis Conference?" Campbell's uncle asks, smiling deviously and sarcastically fishing for a reaction. "They've never tried that before have they? It looks like it'll be sorted within a year..."

When Campbell's grandfather bows his head to say grace before our meal, he asks if anyone would like to sing a song before we start. Dara, one of the younger granddaughters, requests "Joy to the World," and I expect (as I'm used to hearing at impromptu family sing-a-longs) a half-hearted, off-key rendition. But I'd forgotten the Menonite tradition, explained to me earlier by a proud Campbell, for spontaneous group singing in harmony. In Campbell's family, they take this tradition particularly seriously.

"Joy to the World" was a rousing, beautiful ode in four-part harmony, with everyone knowing their part perfectly. I struggled to choose a key. Robert was hopeless. As the family finished the meal and moved into the living room to read the Christmas story and sing more hymns and carols, it became increasingly clear that Robert had absolutely no hope of singing anything in key. He couldn't even follow the melody. I tried to throw in a few harmonies to impress the family (no one noticed) but as I filmed Robert, I started to feel bad, slightly embarrassed for him. He really was terrible. At times when he did actually make a sound, it was way off. Not even close to the tune. I was filming him closely for the documentary, but it ended up looking like an exercise in humiliate him, and getting it all on tape for future humiliations, possibly broadcast around the work on Al-Jazeera International.

No one said peace-loving, Christian army deserters had to be able to sing.

A Few Days Waiting

2007-12-27T15:56:00.000Z

The next few days pass slowly. Robert and I have little to do, except wait for something else to happen. The weather is well below zero in Northern Indiana, and the hotel room's heater barely works. I watch cheap tv at night because I can find little inspiration to do anything else. I go for short runs while the sun is still up, slipping on ice in the road and running straight into snow and oncoming car headlights (there are no pavements in this part of the city).

Because Robert has no plan of his own - he is working based on Campbell's advice - he's often left waiting for Campbell before making any real decisions. He's very much alone in this - without family or friends to support him. On the days Campbell spends away from us, with his family, Robert is lost. He often asks me about the process, about how military law treats people like him (what should we call them? Conscientious objectors? Deserters? Criminals? Patriots? It depends on who you ask) Robert asks me about turning himself in, about protocol and procedures. I know only what I've been reading lately about it, but I try to put his mind at ease as best as I can. He switches quickly and constantly between acting very confident, and showing his true vulnerable self.

Most of the time, he considers everything he wants to say very carefully. Listening to his reasoning, his intelligent speech, you would never guess he was only 19. Most of the time he presents himself as a very relaxed, but angry kid.

But one night he gets a little drunk and I finally see the angry teenager. He vents his anger at the military, yelling at me in the deserted hotel bar as though I was the military.
"You just degrade me like that, trying to make me feel less than human! Everything is designed so that the men who were once soldiers being picked on and beaten up then become officer, and they pick on you and bear up the soldiers under their command because that's how they were treated. You de-humanise everyone! How can you ask me to respect when you treat me like shit!"

It goes on like this for almost an hour - occasionally looking up at the television above his head to distract myself - before I have to ask Robert to calm down, and I leave for my room to watch more cheap television and fall asleep.

This Small Town

2007-12-26T00:24:00.000Z

As Campbell drives us through this small town in Northern Indiana, Robert and I slump into exhaustion. He jokes with Campbell about the experience, about the state Trooper who was only interested in questions about videos on YouTube, the moment we thought he would surely be arrested. I laugh with him, somewhat reveling in the fact that we're finally safe. I'm tired and hungry, looking out the window, into the freezing night, watching the quintessential American signs pass us by: the glowing MacDonalds logo, petrol stations, green road signs, stick on lettering in front of Churches wishing me a Merry Christmas and reminding me that Jesus loves me.

As he drives, Campbell calls his father asking where he recommends as a safe house for Robert. We pull into a Motel where we'll be staying for two nights until the safe house is confirmed. We pay in cash just in case the FBI are looking out for credit card transactions. After dumping our bags into our rooms, Robert and Campbell sit on opposite beds, eating the pizza we ordered for dinner (everywhere else was closed...) and falling into theological debates. They're not arguments, though Robert enjoys being combative, perhaps knowing that his knowledge of the Bible and its interpretations is immense. They discuss drinking, is it written in the Bible that Christians shouldn't drink, or just that they shouldn't get drunk? Robert's Chaplain in the army who - amongst other things - advocated hitting your children believes the Bible instructs Christians not to drink at all. He also believes the war in Iraq to be one battle in a major Christian-Muslim Holy War, so I wouldn't take his opinion as gospel. Anyone whose job it is to provide religious justification for war should be suspect...

Pizzas finished, we head to the bar downstairs for a drink. It was closed when we checked in, and the receptionist told us that Christmas Day it wouldn't be open. But the bar-tender agreed to open it just for a few drinks for his friends. Then we found it open so he could hardly refuse to serve us (though he did demand exact change). We sit in the cold bar, right beside the speaker churning out loud hip-hop, with the dance floor empty beside us. On the tvs above our heads various sports games are playing. The Patriots are set to be the first team in history to finish a 16-game season undefeated. I don't care about American football, but Robert seems excited.

Two flights

2007-12-25T06:00:00.000Z

These are the worst flights of my life. I want to get them over with as quickly as possible, my stomach permanently tense. I want to bang my fist against the airplane window. I want to be in Indiana instantly, can't stand to wait for one take off and landing, another wait in another airport, another take-off and landing. It's just dragging out the inevitable, that's how I feel.

Robert, too, is certain that, any minute now, the Troopers would be back, having spoken to his platoon, with orders to detain him. We wait by the gate before we board in Connecticut. Our names are called again at the gate, but this time only to re-issue us with boarding passes. I want to run on to the plane as fast as possible, yell at the pilot "Don't you know what's happening? We need to get out of here as soon as possible!"

Once on the plane, I'm waiting anxiously for them to close the cabin doors as quickly as possible. I hope for the wheels to run quickly over the tarmac until we lift off and can at last see the airport shrink below us, and feel safe for the two hours it takes us to reach Chicago.

There, we expect the police to be waiting for Robert on the tarmac. Surely, by this point, they would have contacted the platoon and get orders to arrest him.

"This is where the black SUVs pull up" Robert laughs as we hit the runway at O'Hare. Throughout the flight, he keeps repeating as much to himself as anyone else:
"I can't believe this, it could have been so easy. I can't believe my sister would do this. My own flesh and blood. Merry Christmas, you know!" And he laughs nervously.

He had called his sister from the airport in Connecticut, as soon as the Troopers were done questioning him, but she denied she had called the FBI.
"They called me" she told him, but of course he didn't believe her.

At O'Hare, we sit in Chilis to get something to eat. We're both damn hungry, more from tension thank anything else. All I had today was a small muffin from Dunkin' Donuts. There are servicemen all over the airport. Whenever we pass one, I expect him to turn to Robert and ask his name, hold up a photograph, ask for his ID, and radio it in. I eat because I'm hungry, but my stomach was still turning.

At every gate, with each member of staff, I expect to be found out. Everywhere I look, everyone I looked at, I expect they know what Robert's doing, and every announcement over the loudspeaker makes me cringe with the thought of hearing our names read out again. I had expected there would be descriptions of Robert sent to O'Hare airport, since the FBI knew all our flight details by this point.

But none of this happens. Campbell would later describe it as a Christmas Miracle...

State Troopers: The Conclusion

2007-12-25T03:00:00.000Z

I'm standing still for about an hour, as I try to humour the bomb-disposal Trooper and Robert's interrogation continues with the Sergeant. Finally the Sergeant lets Robert walk outside for another cigarette, and asks me over for some questions. He doesn't make small talk like the Trooper, he gets straight to the point, definitely someone who wants to assert his authority. But he's also fair enough to answer me with respect when I ask him questions.

He wears a round hat that makes him look like a Canadian Mountie.
"The situation is," he tells me "we got a call from Robert's sister saying she was concerned that he was planing on deserting the army,"
"Oh," I reply, saying as little as possible. I don't t want to let on that I know, but I also don't want to deny that I know in case he finds out eventually that I'm lying. One thing I've learned from interrogation at Israeli airports: if you don't know what they know, it's always safer to tell the truth - as incriminating as it may be - than to be caught lying.

I tell the Sergeant as little as I can get away with. I always feel, in situations like this, that I have a certain degree of immunity as a journalist. It may not be true, but at least it gives me the confidence to look the Sergeant in the eye and tell him what he wants to know. He radios in my information to another officer, and I lean in to overhear pieces of the conversation.

"I've got this journalist with me from Britain. I heard something about Al-Jazeera, he says he's doing a documentary."

As relaxed as I feel, and as calm as Robert looks, I'm still convinced that it's all over, that they're here to arrest Robert and as soon as they hear from his unit, they'll take him away in handcuffs.

But this doesn't happen. To my surprise, when the Sergeant finally lets me outside to talk to Robert, he's enjoying a cigarette with the bomb-disposal officer. They're discussing Robert's position as a conscientious objector.
"We're not holding you, you're free to fly now, we're just trying to clear this up," he tells Robert.

Inside, bomb-disposal officer wants to ask me a few questions, so I turn the camera to him.
"Oh, they have nothing to do with this," he explains "I just want to know how I can put my own videos on YouTube. I don't get it. I'm not good with technology. You got three wires; red, yellow and black and I don't know what to do with them!"

State Troopers: The Interrogation

2007-12-25T02:00:00.000Z

The first trooper that approaches us asks Robert's name to confirm his identity. He asks for ID. He looks into the camera and says "hello to anyone watching this on YouTube". It's only the beginning our conversations about YouTube with this feckless cop. He explains to Robert that they were just checking up on him based on a phone call. We still have no idea, at that point, that his own sister had called the FBI to turn him in.

A Sergeant eventually comes over and takes control. It's clear he's in charge, he doesn't joke with us the way the bomb disposal expert does, the Sergeant doesn't wave at the camera. The bomb-disposal trooper deferrs everything to him as the Sergeant put his hand in front of the camera and asked me to turn it off. He took Robert aside and interrogated him separately.

I was left with the feckless trooper. He seemed to have no idea what was going on around him
"We're not holding him, we're just checking up on him"
He wanted to talk about college football, he talked about the riots in London but he was thinking of Paris. "Oh, there all over there" he said, waving his hand to indicate the Atlantic between the United States and everything over there.

I was sure that Robert was being arrested. It would be a quick and possibly easier end to his plans, saving him being on the run for 30 days, saving him the fear and tension of knowing, over the next month, that the military was looking for him. I was doing my best to follow his interrogation with the Sergeant while humouring the Trooper in front of me, now asking me questions about the reason for this film.

I made up a story about filming a documentary on the regeneration of small American towns. It was all I could think of after I looked up the name of Robert's town online and found it contained a "traditional" Main Street, and an old cinema opened by the original Warner Brothers themselves.

"But what about your friend in the military, what are you doing with him?"
"Uh...well, with these small towns, when a lot of guys go to the military, they lose a lot of their work force, so that has a lot of influence on how they have to re-generate their cities."

He seemed happy with that, and threw in his own opinion.
"Yeah, I know Torrington pretty well, it's a pretty - I don't want to be insulting - but it's a pretty lower class place where there aren't many opportunities for guys."

While trying to pretend I was keeping up a conversation with the Trooper, I kept looking over my shoulder to see what was happening with Robert and the Sergeant. Barely concentrating, I kept talking with the Trooper about sports, music, college...

State Troopers: The Introduction

2007-12-25T01:00:00.000Z

This is the story of our narrow escape:

Robert and I headed to Bradley Airport, Connecticut, on the morning of December 25th, Christmas morning. It was quite a depressing way to spend Christmas morning, but I got the feeling from Robert that he never had a particularly good experience at home anyway, so perhaps he wasn't missing much.

Our first Chicago flight is canceled because of bad weather, so we have four hours to kill. We buy breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts and sit with our coffees to wait, discussing what foods contain trans-fats. Robert laughs to himself because he's eating a bacon croissant, full of trans-fats, and he'd spent the past few days telling me how unhealthy they were.

Later, we sit by the giant window, overlooking the runway, filming a few questions before we fly. It was supposed to be a very simple journey, connect through Chicago to a smaller town, then get our ride from there to the safe house. He would be underground before the military even realised he was missing. But something went wrong.

While we're sitting and talking, Robert's name is called over the loudspeaker, asking him to go to the ticket counter. Robert suddenly looks up, at the speakers, scared. He asks me what he should do. After a few moments of deliberation, he decides that hs has to go to the counter, it might just be a question about our changed tickets.

We picked up our bags and walk back through security, Robert is worried that this is it. Somehow they had found him, and they were here to arrest him. He walked outside the airport first for a cigarette,
"If I'm going to be arrested, I want a last cigarette" he chuckles.
"Alright,"he sighs, as he stubs out his cigarette, "I guess this is it. I was going to get arrested anyway, so this just makes it a really short journey."

The plan was for him to wait in hiding for 30 days, then his name would be struck from the active duty roster, then he could turn himself in and do his time in prison, but without the danger of being sent - in handcuffs if necessary - back to serve in Iraq.

He walks back inside, approaching the ticket counter. Surprisingly, the guy behind the counter doesn't seem to know why Robert's been called:
"No, I didn't call you. Hey!" he turns to the other man at the counter behind him and calls out "did any of you call this gentleman? No?"

Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe they just wanted to check that he had picked up his new boarding pass. Relieved, we walk back to security and start to take of our shoes, our jackets, our belts to slide them through the x-ray machine again. Half way through, with my shoes and belt off, we hear his name again over the load speaker.

This time, as we quickly collect our things and walk out to the departure lounge for the second time, we finally see what we were expecting: two state troopers, standing in front of the airport exit.

"Yep, this is it" Robert says to me, without too much regret.

Indiana

2007-12-25T00:43:00.000Z

Our flights take us to Northern Indiana, where Robert has arranged to meet the man who's going to help him go into hiding. "Campbell" has done this before, helping unsuccessful conscientious objector applicants to hide from the military police until they're ready to turn themselves in. Usually, they wait 31 days until their names are struck from their unit roll to ensure that, when they do finally turn themselves in, their unit doesn't simply try to send them back into combat in handcuffs. It happened to another conscientious objector, Agustin Aguayo, but he didn't stop running. He eventually served time in prison, but he believed he was doing the right thing, and now he campaigns against others joining the military.

Talking to Campbell on my mobile as soon as we touch down, he tells me to let Robert walk out first, alone, while I wait to collect his bags in case the military police have finally been alerted to his flight path and are expecting him to walk out with a journalist. With Robert safely outside the airport, Campbell joins me beside the luggage carousel, joking comfortably about our situation. He points to a sign above the exit: "Michiana welcomes back its service men and women". Despite people like Campbell, this is a red state, the home of the Hummer, and heavily invested in defence spending.

On the drive through the freezing night, Robert and I tell the story of our narrow escape from the state troopers. Campbell, like the rest of us, still finds it hard to be believe that Robert's own sister would turn him in. "I don't know, it doesn't surprise me that much," Robert adds. That only makes it worse...

We can finally rest for a moment, finally joke about our situation. The interrogation, the flights, that certainty that Robert was going to be arrested - possibly with me - was exhausting, draining.

We weren't expecting it, of course.

"Usually," Campbell explains, "We don't have to deal with anything like this until a few weeks into it when their unit realises they're missing..." But we got it out of the way sooner. I watch the city lights reflecting off the car window, the air outside sharp with snow and ice. I listen to Robert and Campbell laughing together, discussing the next 31 days during which Robert will be in hiding, waiting for the right time to turn himself in and, if necessary, serve his time in prison.

We drive in to the Travelodge where Robert and I check in for two nights until Campbell can arrange for a safe house. I leave a London address, a combination of several of my old addresses which the receptionist misspells anyway. I don't want to be able to traced in case the police come looking for us. They already know we were flying in to here, it wouldn't take much for them to search the hotels closest to the airport for our names.

Campbell has some good news a little later that night. The hotel bar, which we were told was closed for Christmas, was open for a few hours. They didn't plan to serve anyone except a few friends, but we ordered anyway and sat in the freezing bar, music hammering on an empty dance floor, and talked about the journey so far.

AWOL

2007-12-22T19:43:00.000Z

From the stories we've heard so far about people who enlist in the military - and people who try to get out as conscientious objectors - Robert is fairly typical. He enlisted when he was only 17, and needed his parents to sign a consent form. He says he didn't know what else to do - he had nowhere else to go, no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His mother had also joined the military under similar circumstances when she was younger. His older sister is now in the National Guard.

Robert is from a fairly typical "broken home." His parents are divorced, his father took his mother Anne to court, and now she lives on welfare in government housing.
She has two other kids from another man, a man with eleven kids himself who broke her nose in a fight once. She also has another daughter from another man whom she doesn't seem to know very well. Her brother, Robert's uncle, is in prison after being arrested for drunk driving for the fifth time, but even Robert doesn't know this. Robert joined the military when he literally had no other choice, after his mother kicked him out of the house and, later, the friend whom he was living with was also kicked out of his house. With no job, and nowhere to live, Robert finished high-school a year early and enlisted at 17.

We at Tourist have been following the story of Robert closely for several months now, since before we started filming in Germany, because he seemed like such a sincere and eloquent conscientious objector. He was in email contact with Michael at the Military Counseling Network once every few weeks, explaining that he wanted out of the military as a conscientious objector, and saying he was willing to go AWOL. We were very eager to follow Robert's story, and film the process of getting out with him, so when we heard his application had been rejected, and he was planning to go AWOL, we decided to fly to the US immediately to join him on the run.

His mother, Anne, picks me up from the airport. She doesn't seem to trust me, and she's not afraid to say it.
I realise it's very strange me just showing up from out of nowhere and recording her son's life, but sometimes Anne takes it a little too far.
"I don't know who you are, I don't know what your agenda is."
"Well, I don't have an agenda."
"Yeah, well, you say that, but I don't know you."
"Okay, uhh...but I guess you just have to trust me,"
"I mean, you could be a terrorist or something, I don't know,"
"Yeah...uhh...well I guess you just need to trust me that I want to tell your son's story."

Later, she confronts me again in front of Robert,
"This film isn't going to be unAmerican, is it?"
"Well, no, I don't have that in mind,"
"Robert, it's not going to be unAmerican is it?"

But, despite all this, she still seems to have a lot of - perhaps begrudging - respect for me. She doesn't mind telling it straight, but she also doesn't mind me telling it straight.

I get the feeling she's been through too much already to waste time bullshitting. Or, if I take Robert's word for it, she's just crazy.

Robert, too, isn’t afraid to tell it straight. He has a lot in common with his mother, though he might not like to hear that. They both say “I don’t care” a lot. They both say “I don’t know” and then go on to explain that they actually do know. Robert isn’t afraid to talk about everything he’s been through, and everything he’s planning. I appreciate that it’s a surreal situation for him to suddenly find a cameraman following him, “I don’t know what to expect,” he told me on the phone before I left London.

“I don’t know what to expect, either,” I told him.

The Path of Even More Resistance

2007-12-20T22:17:00.000Z

After a successful week filming in Bammental, Germany with the Military Counseling Network, we thought our latest film was going well. We had principal photography done, we were on schedule and under budget, and - surprisingly - the war in Iraq was not yet over, ensuring our film wasn't suddenly redundant.

All we had left was a quick return trip to Germany to film a prize-giving ceremony with a well-known Iraq War conscientious objector-turned-deserter, followed by an interview with said objector-turned-deserter. It was to be a touching and beautiful end to the film, a plucking of the heart-strings as this shy but determined man told the story of his transformation from gun-toting medic to lover of humanity.

But no. It wasn't to be so easy. The man (whose name I won't mention for his own sake) had changed his mind. After two months of contact, he suddenly went quiet. He went from expressing his support for the project to completely ignoring us. We finally tracked him down to the house of a gynecologist in Heidelberg (the association is, I'm told, immaterial) where he explained that he didn't want to be associated with Al-Jazeera.

Or, to be more accurate, he first he said he was too busy and tired to be interviewed, which sounded a little suspect coming from a man who was willing to go to prison for his ideals, and who has dedicated his life - since being discharged - to highlighting the inequalities and brutalities of the US military in Iraq. He's been doing interviews, marches and protests since his release from prison - this guy doesn't get "too busy and tired." Eventually Gareth called him (I was too afraid to push it...) and arrived at the truth. He was scared.

"I already get enough hate mail and abuse from Americans," he explained timidly. "I don't want to get any more." He was worried about the heartland of American, the Bible-belters: precisely the kind of people who would NEVER WATCH AL-JAZEERA. Especially since, as we explained to him, Al-Jazeera doesn't even broadcast in the US unless you specifically subscribe.

"Everyone who will hate you already hates you!" I wanted to say to him. But I didn't. "The Bible-belters already thing you're a traitor! They couldn't possibly hate you any more!"

We did all we could, we called his friends whom we had already filmed with for a week and asked them to convince him. No luck. We tried to pressure him. We tried to emotionally blackmail him (note to Gareth: you tried emotional blackmail, right?) No luck.

It was clear by the end of the conversation that there was no chance we were going to get this man to talk to us. We were not happy. I was afraid the whole film was ruined. We had wasted money on tickets, our schedule was out the window, we were pissed.

But then something even better came along...

The Path of Most Resistance

2007-10-12T17:22:00.000+01:00

With major operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and enlistment at its lowest level for decades, the United States military is desperate for new recruits. At the same time, the military is seeing unprecedented numbers of deserters and Conscientious Objectors refusing to be re-deployed.

Tourist With A Typewriter's latest production, THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE, tells the story of US soldiers who - while awaiting redeployment in American’s war zones – dared to challenged the military machine by deserting or applying for Conscientious Objector status, and joined the growing movement of anti-war veterans.

We are currently filming THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE in the southern Germany town of Bammental, where the Military Counseling Network - an organisation dedicated to helping US soldiers get out of the army - is based. We will be back in London on November 16th for the first cut of the film, and returning to Germany in December for an additional two or three days of shooting.

Look out for daily updates of the production from director Gareth Keogh and producer Saeed Taji Farouky.

Screenings & Broadcasts

2007-08-28T23:48:00.001+01:00

Following the successful premier screening of Tunnel Trade (an investigation into Gaza's underground smuggling economy) and A Midsummer Night's War (asking if culture and art can survive the ravages of war), the two films will be broadcast on Al-Jazeera English.

Tunnel Trade will screen on People & Power at these times:
Monday, September 3 (0130 GMT)
Tuesday, September 4 (0630 and 1330 GMT)
Saturday, September 8 (0300 and 2030 GMT)

Film screenings

2007-08-07T12:18:00.000+01:00

With the broadcast of Tunnel Trade on Al-Jazeera International fast approaching, we will be screening our two most recent films - Tunnel Trade and A Midsummer Night's War - at London's Frontline Club on August 26th, 2007.

Find details of the screening, including how to purchase tickets, here.

Visit our website for more details about the films.

Trailer online

2007-07-29T14:04:00.000+01:00

The trailer for Tourist's first documentary, I See The Stars At Noon, is finally available online, thanks to the wonder of YouTube. Watch the trailer here

You can also now buy copies of the 57-minute DVD directly from us.

I See The Stars At Noon is the story of a Moroccan man's attempt to illegally immigrate to Spain. In January of 2004, in the northern Moroccan city of Tangiers, Saeed Taji Farouky met a 26-year old Moroccan named Abdlfattah. He was a clandestine, one of many Africans who try to cross the narrow Straits of Gibraltar - stowing away on cargo ships or boarding inflatable rafts - and illegally enter Spain. By the end of their first meeting, Abdlfattah had agreed to let Saeed follow him to film every aspect of his journey, including his dealings with people-smugglers, his struggle to raise the 750 Euro fee, and his final days with his family before leaving

The End Is Near

2007-07-25T23:01:00.000+01:00

Finally, A Midsummer Night's War is complete. We thought we had missed our chance, having taken nearly a year to finish it, but now it seems it was well-timed for the year anniversary of the summer 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon.

We submitted the film to the Canary Wharf Film Festival, and are also in negotiations with Al-Jazeera International to broadcast the film as part of the programming for the anniversary of the war.

Work continues with Tunnel Trade, a 21-minute documentary about smuggling through tunnels under the border between Gaza Strip and Egypt, also for Al-Jazeera International. The rough cut is complete, and will be delivered tomorrow for comments.

Soundtrack

2007-06-13T21:24:00.001+01:00

Work is ongoing, if a little slow, with the film. We've shot another three films since the production of A Midsummer Night's War, but this will be our next next finished project.

At the moment, we're just putting the finishing touches to the picture edit, and moving into sound edit and music composition. The process is being slowed down by the fact that we're editing remotely, but hopefully it'll be done before too long. Out goal now is to have it ready by the end of June in order to submit it to the Canary Wharf Film Festival, and then arrange a series of screenings in London and (hopefully, in the future) in Lebanon.

I'm reading the news now about Lebanon, it seemed at the time of filming (and when I returned again in February 2007) that the country was trying to pick itself up and put itself together again. There was some optimism then, despite the bus bombing of February 13, there was still that spirit of moving on. Now Nahr El Bard, and more bombings on the streets of Beirut. The worst violence since the end of the civil war. It seems, perhaps, the cycle is starting again, and it makes me wonder if the film is still relevant now. Maybe too much has happened since the summer war to make a film about reconstruction valid...

It Is Happening Again

2007-05-31T22:04:00.000+01:00

I thought it would happen again. In the lobby of Al-Deera hotel, a man working at the reception came in through the front door looking nervous.
“They just killed the leader of Hamas in Gaza.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Where? Where did the Israeli’s bomb.”
He paused just for a breath, “No, it wasn’t the Israelis. Palestinians…”

I thought it would happen again. The story was that Abu Hamza Abu Gaines was killed and taken to El-Shifa hospital, not far from the hotel. He said there were clashes there, but I still couldn’t hear anything.

I thought everything would start again, the killings and kidnappings and executions. The explosions and midnight gunfights.

But it was only a rumour. Abu Hamza hadn’t been killed, he was merely injured, and the injury itself happened outside El-Shifa’. That night passed quietly. The Palestinians had other things to worry about. The Israeli bombings continued.

A Tunnel and Two Chickens

2007-05-30T22:03:00.000+01:00

Ahmed is a tunnel digger. He says he’s 19, but doesn’t look much older than 16. We walk with him through the wreckage of a demolished house in Rafah, within site of the Egyptian border, asking questions about his work. Unlike Abu Anfaq, he’s not afraid to admit what he really does:
“I bring in weapons for the resistance, to fight Israel. And to make money.”
But the occupation is over. Like Youssef Siam said, the weapons are now just arming Palestinians to kill other Palestinians.
“No, it’s not like that,” Ahmed maintains. “I don’t get involved in that. They’re fighting the Israelis.”
Like everyone else we’ve spoken to so far about the tunnels, he says he does it because there’s no other work available. It’s only partly true – the other reason is that there’s no other work available that can make you as much money as trading through the tunnels.
“I want a car, a nice house, to get married eventually…”

Later, he takes me to a tunnels he and his friends are working on. Their all 19, perhaps early 20’s. One of them carries a Kalashnikov, unloaded. He lets me hold it, and shows me how to cock the gun. I quickly give it back, admitting I’m not comfortable with guns. I’m also just trying to read these kids, to see if I can trust them with their offer to let me down into the tunnel to film.

I climb down the chute, four metres deep, gripping the walls with my hands and feet to lower myself down slowly. They pass the camera down carefully. Ahmed crouches down and slides into the tunnel’s opening, telling me to follow him. The opening is barely wide enough for me to fit through, and I have to scrape my elbows against the rough, sandy ground to hold the camera in front of me at the same time. It’s hot down there, I can hardly breath for the first five or six metres, the walls so close I can taste sand. Ahmed moves much more easily down here, scurrying in ahead of me like a rabbit. My knees are scraping against the floor, my head against the roof. My trousers fill with sand every time I brush against the tunnel’s roof.

At one point, still early on, I have to pause to ask myself if I can continue. Slowly, it becomes easier to breath as I get used to the staleness of the air. I’m already breathing heavily only a few minutes into the crawl, a combination of the physical effort and my own nerves.

Perhaps ten metres in, Ahmed points to the right, showing me a breathing hole used to allow fresh air into the tunnel. Then he asks if I want to go on.
“How much further is it?”
“It goes all the way to Egypt, but there’s just ahead where we can rest and turn around.
I decide not to go all the way to Egypt. Another five metres ahead, and the tunnel suddenly opens widely as it hits an underground spring. The kids call it the rest stop. They spend time here relaxing, sometimes having dinner.

Ahmed sits in complete darkness, but I’m filming with an infrared light. Every time I point the camera at his asked face, his eyes glow green. I scan the room, feeling only slightly more comfortable now that I have room to stand up straight. The truth is, I want to get out of there as fast as possible, but that means going back through the narrow tunnel.

It feels so vulnerable crawling through there. Anything could happen, and I would have no way to run. I imagine the tunnel filling with poisonous gas, the gas the Egyptian authorities throw down when they find smugglers under their border. I couldn’t even turn around. People sometimes die down here just from panic.

Half way back down the tunnel, and my muscles are in pain. I’m breathing more heavily now, as though exercising. My muscles aren’t used to this. Crawling is painful now, my knees and elbows scraping raw against the dirt. I can see the light ahead, but it’s still an effort, those last five metres. I emerge, looking up to see the others looking down at me. I’m covered in sand, under my clothes, filing my hair.
“how was in,” one of them asks.
“difficult…” I mumble.

Earlier, we went to buy two chickens for Ibrahim, the creepy man who welcomes guests into a tent amidst the row of destroyed houses that directly face the wall. He took us down into the opening of a disused tunnel, showed us around, told us the story of his brother who was killed by an Israeli sniper when he approached a house here suspected of holding a tunnel.

Ibrahim wants money, but Laila and Fida are certain he’s going to use it to buy cigarettes or drugs while his children run around barefoot, so we agree to barter. He wants a pair of trousers. Laila and Fida are afraid he could sell the trousers, so we suggest a chicken. He wants two chickens – fresh - so he gets in the car with us, driving around the market of Rafah until we find a man selling fresh chickens.

He slits their throats, drains the blood, boils the body, pulls out the feathers, and guts the two birds in a few brief minutes. All on the porch of his shop. From living chicken on my right to cleaned and gutted meals on my left. Ibrahim takes the bag, satisfied, and we drive him back to his house.

Preventative Security

2007-05-29T22:02:00.000+01:00

Youssef Siam is head of preventative security in Gaza. A Fateh man, he hangs a picture of Arafat and Abu Mazen in his office, though he admits near the end of our interview, “I don’t even support the government.”

One of Siam’s responsibilities is to stop the illegal smuggling of weapons through the tunnels, passing under Gaza’s border with Egypt. But he admits he’s powerless against them. He mentions Alan Johnston, he knows who holds him, he says. But no one will mention the name of the Doghmosh clan, the infamous criminal family all but known to be holding the journalist in exchange for money, land and the release of a female prisoner in British custody. The Palestinian Authority knows exactly who holds him, but the clan is so powerful even the government can’t push them around.

“How can I provide security for the country when I can’t even provide security for myself,” Siam tells us. He has the features and build of a tough, but now powerless, man.
“I could step outside my house, and [he holds up his hands in the shape of a machine gun]. I spent ten years in prison for Palestine, before these gunmen were even born.”

I offer that maybe Israel is still to blame for the infighting here. The long arm of the occupation still controls Gaza’s borders and economy, even after the “official” occupation has ended.
“What occupation?” He asks in disbelief. “You think these people are fighting the Israelis? I’ll tell you what they’re fighting for,” and he points at the picture of Abu Mazen hanging on his wall.
“They’re fighting for ‘the chair’”, he uses a curios Arabic phrase, ‘the chair.’ It means the seat of power, but the insignificance of the word in Arabic does more to illustrate the futility of this fighting.

“what are they fighting over,” asked a shop owner last week at the height of the street clashes, “the garbage in the streets?” He was right. There’s little to command here, even if you do own the chair.

Believe in God

2007-05-26T22:02:00.000+01:00

The helicopters are hovering closer tonight. The buzz of the drone is louder. Israel has been increasing the intensity of their bombings, but the proble is, they’re running out of targets. The other night, I spoke to Mahmoud who works in one of the money exchanges hit by Israeli missiles only 10 metres from my hotel room. It was, of course, part of a “Hamas funding network.” Maybe it was, but it was also someone’s business. Any one of a thousand money exchanges could be used to transfer money to Hamas without the owner ever even knowing.
“Why did they hit here?” I asked Mahmoud.
“Just to show us that they can,” he replied. It made perfect sense.

The owner of the shop, in that split second explosion, became another one of Gaza’s unemployed. One more person who might become a criminal because there’s no work. Maybe one more who turns to smuggling arms to make money. Arms that are later unleashed on Israel. Everything was coming full circle.

In the taxi to Rafah, Maher explains the problem. Many of Israel’s targets were circumstantial. We stopped at two large metal workshops, completely eviscerated in the early days of Israel’s bombing campaign. Israel says they were manufacturing weapons, but what does it take to become a “weapons manufacturing workshop”? Maher explains that fighters would buy an empty gas canister and turn it into a 50kg bomb, or pipes and turn them into mortars. Suddenly the gas canister supply store or the plumber’s shop becomes a “weapons manufacturing workshop,” and is shredded to pieces, surrounding houses and passers by also destroyed.

No one knew the truth, and no one was asking the right questions. Israel sticks to their official line, and few foreign agencies have anyone reporting from Gaza who can investigate. Yesterday, they hit a carpenter’s shop.

Israeli attacks weren’t the only thing bothering Maher. He was also remembering the Palestinian violence of last week.
“It wasn’t always like this,” he said with resignation. Five years ago, he sat with a friend and was shocked to hear he had a gun. That was under the Israeli occupation, and owning a gun could get you 20 years in prison. One day Israeli soldiers came to his friend’s house while Maher was there, but he managed to talk them away.
“I speak Hebrew well, so I talked to them, but I could have gone to prison for it.”
Now, men was the streets with RPG launchers slung over their shoulders and no says a word.

Many of the armed men are not fighters, but members of the private militias of criminal gangs. They often fought their own bloody street battles for personal vendettas or control over business. One of those gangs was still holding Alan Johnston.

Maher mentioned his brother.
”He’s dead now. He used to take drugs, cocaine. He cried when the Israelis left.”
Maher couldn’t understand why. Everyone was dancing in the streets the day the occupation ended, but his brother was crying.
“He knew,” Maher muttered, “he knew what was going to happen.”

Maher once fell in love with an Israeli girl when he worked as a driver for an Israeli bus company. He met a Polish girl in Tel Aviv and fell in love, he got along well with her father, and his own father was happy for them to marry if she would convert to Islam. But she refused. The last he saw of her was at her own wedding.

“I still think about her every once in a while,” he tells me. “I really loved here. I never slept with her, or even kissed her, because she was such a good girl. I really loved her.”

Maher used to make good money here, before all the borders were sealed and the boycott of the Hamas government crippled what was left of Gaza’s economy. He could make 500 Shekels a day renting out one of his cars. Now, he has to rent a taxi for 50 shekels a day, hoping to make enough in fares to support his family. On a bad day, when he makes less than 50 Shekels, he ays the difference from his pocket.

That night, I’m awake until 3:30. I hear the Adhan over the city, but tonight, the dissonance echoing makes it sounds sinister. I can say I believe in God. I can say I love him and he loves me, wants to protect me, want to keep me safe. I can say I believe in his message, and that he wants to people of the world to do good. But how can I believe he’s the same God watching over men as they slit each other’s throats?

Second Night

2007-05-25T22:00:00.000+01:00

12:30. Another attack, even closer than last night. Two shops, side by side, gutted. Smoke spills from the room. The same curious crowds and angry shop keepers, forcing everyone back. This time, there was a secondary explosion. The first made me jump under my desk. The second shook the room so hard I thought my windows would break. The drone flashed, seconds after the explosion, taking pictures for tomorrow’s news.

The Eye In The Sky

2007-05-24T21:59:00.000+01:00

At night, I walk to the café next to my hotel for a sheesha. There is a football match on the giant screen in the back, AC Milan vs Liverpool. I’m still trying to relax in Gaza, but it’s not any easier. At least the crowd of men, drinking coffee and sucking on their sheesha pipes, makes me feel a little safer, like perhaps ordinary life really is returning once again to the city. But above the sound of the match, the sound of Israeli drones is getting louder. Her motor increases in pitch as she dives in for a better view. She’s looking for something. Soon after, the sound of a helicopter gunship churning the air above us. I remember what Laila told me – if you can hear the engine above you, it means the gunship will fire on a target around 500m away. I can’t tell how close it is now.

The match ends, AC Milan 2 – Liverpool 1. The men in the café yell to each other, some cheering, others moping. I can still hear the helicopter above us, and I decide to head back to my hotel as quickly as possible.

At 11:45, there is that familiar sound. I heard it only a few days ago when a gunship fired on the tree outside my hotel. It was louder this time, a fierce hissing, getting quickly louder. I braced myself, knowing what was coming. The explosion rattled the windows of my room. Looking out the window, smoke rose from a hundred or so metres down my street.

My feet crunched over broken glass as I walked closer to the site. I passed a couple of boys, meeting their friends walking the other way. “I told you not to come. There’s nothing, go back…” He means no one was killed. There’s no blood to look at.

The missile hit a money exchanger. Two men in Jalabiyahs are getting annoyed at the crowed gathering outside the shop – a few journalists, but mostly just curious neighbours. One man is yelling, waving his hands furiously. “Go away! Leave us! There’s nothing here! Leave us!” The blast threw the shop’s metal shutters over 30 metres away. All the shops surrounding the exchange were also destroyed, and shopkeepers walk down from their apartments to inspect the damage.

Before long, a car pulls up and everyone stops to watch an older man, walking with a cane, stepping slowly out of the passenger seat. He’s the shop’s owner. The two older men take his hand, kiss him on the cheeks, and offer their hope that God protects him.

A fat man with a goatee approaches me, asking how I can film with such little light. His name is Mahmoud, he’s a colleague of the owner of the exchange, and he tells me he, too, was once a journalist in the West Bank for a while.
“Why was this exchange hit?”
“Just to give us a signal. To let us know they can do it.” I’m not convinced.
“But why this exchange in particular.”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of his clients…” and his voice trailed off. I understood what he meant.
“Take care,” Mahmoud says to me as we shake hands goodbye.

On my way back to the hotel, I hear the crackle of a walkie-talkie. A boy is holding a receiver in his hand, standing in the shadow far from the crowd of attention seekers. The voices over the radio are discussing the attack.
“Who is that?”
“That’s the frequency of the Qassam Brigades. I can get Al-Aqsa Brigades as well, wait…” and he retunes the receiver, but there’s no sound.
“Oh, they’re quiet now.”
“What are they saying about the attack?”
“Maybe they were transferring money to Hamas.”
There it was. The Israelis would probably say, if they admitted to this strike at all, that it was transferring money to “terrorists.”

Four hours later, I jolt out of bed to the same sound. This time, the explosion is even closer. Another money exchange. The same scene. Shattered glass scattered across four lanes of road. Men struggling to pull the wreckage apart, to see what’s left in the house. Others yelling at the crowd to leave them alone. Firemen survey the explosion, taking notes and cutting electrical wires. On the ground, blown off the wall of the house, I find the house number: 150/200.

The Playground

2007-05-21T21:58:00.000+01:00

The farmland on the drive leading to Rafah is so peaceful. It’s hard to imagine a few days ago there were roadblocks here, masked gunmen checking cars, eyeing passengers suspiciously. Usually, they would see Laila in the car, a young mother, and wave us through. We would ask Maher, our taxi driver, which gang they belonged to, and he seemed to always have the answer.
“Those are Presidential Guards.”
“How do you know?”
“They have numbers on their guns. Only Presidential Guards numbers their weapons.”
Presidential Guards, a unit of Fateh, the men British media was so naively calling Fateh “Security Forces” battling “Hamas militants.” Funded and armed by the US, these are the forces the UK and US lauded as the legitimate force in Gaza, a force for good. New best friends. Here they were, masked, manning impromptu checkpoints, dragging bearded men from their cars and shooting them. The truth is, both Hamas and Fateh have become thugs, armed gangs obsessed by revenge and battling for control over the streets of Gaza.

Now, on this morning, the road is clear. As quickly as the violence had flared, the gangs retreated (for now) and the roads were safe (for now). I opened the window and felt the sea breeze through my fingers.

We met Fida near her house, this woman so strong and resilient, a symbol of the real Palestinian resistance. The kind of resistance that saw her house bulldozed, lost everything, saw young Mohammad 9 years old shot through the head for crossing the street. She walked into the street after him, the Israeli sniper tower only 5 metres behind her, looking over the houses of Rafah. She could see her family, they were yelling to her
“don’t do it Fida! Don’t move! They’ll kill you! They were saying. But I didn’t hear them. I only heard Mohammad.”

She carried him to the ambulance waiting 50 metres further along the border. But Mohammad died.

Fida brings us to one of the locations being considered for her playground. The first and only playground in Rafah. She points to piles of rubble, concrete blocks and twisted metal.
“There we’ll have the visitor’s centre, the mosque, here’s the playground with the swings, the slides, volleyball and basketball.”

Children flock around us as we’re filming. We do our best to keep them quiet, but their yells and shrieks fill my headphones. They all want to be filmed, they all want to jump in front of the camera.

Later we visit several other playgrounds in Rafah, now destroyed, they’re just rusting carcasses of carousels and climbing frames. The children still flock there, even though there’s nothing left.

On the drive back, Maher points to a roadblock, still standing but abandoned, leading into Khan Younis. “This is where we were held up the other night, remember?” He asks. That night, after we thought all the troubles were over, we were late getting home. It was dark on this road, and two kids approached us on a bicycle as we slowed down to stop.
“Don’t drive, they’ll shoot you…” they warned. Maher kept driving, slowly, to see what was ahead. Laila tried to get Yousuf to lower his head. Her mother started praying.

Eventually we saw them, another gang, armed and wearing masks as usual. Maher stopped 30 metres from the checkpoint. He opened the door and leaned out.
“We have women and a child!” He yelled, “We just want to get home!”
“You’ll be shot!” was the reply.
“We have a kid,” he repeated, “we just want to go home!”
“You’ll be shot…”

He turned back and drove the long way instead.

The Beach

2007-05-20T21:57:00.000+01:00

We can’t stand to be locked up inside anymore. Youssuf, Laila’s son, is going crazy. He’s restless and frustrated. We get in the car, and head to the beach.

There’s a thin haze over everything, the air is moist and sand sticks to everything. Spray covers my glasses and camera lens. I walk towards a family in the distance, sitting around a sheesha pipe, with their horse tied to a caravan. The beautiful animal bears its teeth and paces back and forth, still tied by rope to the caravan’s frame. Her owner holds her head and turns it towards my camera as I take a few pictures of the animal, his back silhouetted by the sun setting over the Mediterranean. Here, it seems you could stand on the beach and always be safe. Nothing could touch you. No bullets would reach here, no Israeli air strikes would target the beach. The water is choppy behind us, “the sea is big,” they say in Arabic.

Behind us, rows of brightly coloured plastic chairs are stacked on tables, flags snap in the wind. Yesterday was peaceful in the city, today too, but still no one is out. People are still afraid. Israeli attacks can distract Gazans for a while, but the gunmen are still roaming the streets. Roadblocks have been removed, it’s true, but the shopkeeper below my building tells Laila a gang came into his shop this morning, threatening to shoot him, and ordered him to shut his shop. But he stayed open.

Now the rules have changed again. Israel hits the house of Khalil El-Hayya, but he’s not home. 8 of his family are killed. Khalil is a Hamas’ lawyer, a member of Parliament, not a fighter. What Israel calls a “non-military target.” His non-military home and non-military family now lie shredded on the streets of Gaza City.

Ceasefire

2007-05-18T21:47:00.000+01:00

The latest decent into violence in Gaza is more than just a broken cease-fire. There are signs of something more sinister. Checkpoints at which gunmen are checking ids. With the intensity of a civil war, the only difference being that the “country” is split along religious, rather than ethnic lines.

Gunfights are no longer isolated incidents, mere breaches of the cease-fire. They last into the night, through the afternoon, with heavy arms, mortars, and occasional Israeli gunships shelling of Eastern and Northern Gaza City.

I am told stories of abductions and executions.
“Tuesday just before Meghrib prayer between 5pm and 6pm. Me, as a neighbour, I was sitting in my home. I heard noises outside. I went to the 11th floor where this man was living. He’s our neighbour. I was stopped by armed gunmen. I told him ‘what are you doing?’ He told me ‘it’s not your business, just leave.’ I told him ‘speak quietly and tell me what’s happening to my neighbour.’
He told me ‘it’s not your business’ and pointed the weapon at me. His face was covered and his face was black.”

Five minutes later, Nahed El-Nimr was shot dead outside his building.
“I can’t believe the Palestinians are doing this to each other.”

I spoke to the man who saw his body. It was blocking the entrance to his supermarket, along with another unidentified body, which remained shut for two days.
“I couldn’t open my shop with two bodies and blood all over the floor…”

At the height of the conflict, in a state of virtual war, Hamas and Fatah laid siege to two residential towers in Western Gaza City. Hamas took up positions inside, occupying peoples’ flats and kicking the families out. Fatah fired RPG’s at the buildings, burning several apartments and scarring the building’s façade with small explosions. The residents were trapped, unable to evacuate as the battle raged on outside.

We reached Um Muntaser by telephone. She lives in Borj El-Saleh, a residential tower in the west of the city, and unidentified gunmen had taken over her building, burning residents’ cars and firing at ambulances attempting to reach the injured. Gunmen were moving from floor to floor searching each appartment.

“We have been living in our kitchen for the past two days,” explained the 42-year-old mother of seven, “11 or 12 apartments have been burned…there are snipers everywhere…we are human beings, what’s our fault in all this?”

The hospitals are running low. Dr. Juma’ Saqqa is head of Al-Shifa’ hospital, the strip’s busiest. Today they’ve received three dead bodies and ten injuries, all innocent bystanders.

“We’re working with what we have. We are working with great difficulties because of lack of drugs, medicines and medical supplies. We don’t have enough stock. It’s dangerous for our staff to move, bullets don’t distinguish.”

The details of the killings are bleeding into one. More Israeli air strikes today – a car, a school, a tree only fifty meters from my hotel. We gather around to see the damage, the assassinated tree, and another trail of smoke shoots over the wall towards us. Everyone panics and scatters, but no explosion follows. The executions continue. A journalist is kidnapped, Abd al-Salam Abu Ashkar, the Gaza bureau chief of Abu Dhabi TV, and released several hours later.

Israeli gunships circle the city, looking for more targets. Drones hover in the sky, watching. The sound of a jet approaching, cover your ears and hold your breath.

This is Free Palestine? What have we done to you, Filasteen? What have you done to us? I can’t bear to look out of the window and see you, hunching down below me, flames still smouldering, lulling me to sleep with the sound of gunfire.

Operation

2007-05-15T21:45:00.000+01:00

The streets are even more dangerous today. Mohammad, on his way to Laila’s house to meet with us, was fired at by a Fatah gunmen in the street. Everything is in lockdown, and the gunman didn’t want anyone moving on the streets.

Mohammad explains that the controversy that started yesterday as we filmed the tunnel isn’t over. Our fixer, Mohammad, was visited last night by Hamas men, one in particular named Ahmed who asked us for our tape yesterday. He demanded to know how we had known what was about to happen in the house with the discovery of the tunnel. He tried to reassure them that we had nothing to do with him, we were working alone, but they didn’t believe him. They threatened Fida. They said it was “suspicious” that we knew exactly where and when the crowd would gather, and shots would be fired, on that house. But it was just luck.

Mohammad hurriedly calls his contact, the area commander of Hamas forces in the Northern Sector, to explain the situation. Mohammaed puts his phone on speaker and retells the story we’ve been through several times now.
After a brief explanation, he asks “So, is it solved?”
“God willing” he answers.

But there are more problems. The other contact Mohammad had established, a man who has made millions from trading through the tunnels, now refuses to meet with us after news of our mysterious appearance at the house yesterday reached him. Mohammad spoke to him, trying to reassure him that we could be trusted, but it was all over, the man assured us. He would never meet with us now that we were suspicious.

Moments later, Mohammad gets a call from the area commander. There’s a huge Fatah operation planned at the Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold. All Hamas fighters have been ordered there, and ordered to bring whatever weapons they have. It’s said that Fatah will be bringing their tanks. In return, Hamas threatened to blow President Mahmoud Abbas’ house “off the face of the earth” if anything happened to their beloved university.

There are gunmen on top of the buildings. There are gunmen on corners, setting up ad hoc roadblocks, checking ids and searching vehicles. They’re stopping drivers with beards, checking to see who is associated with Hamas. It’s a bad sign, reminding me of descriptions of the Lebanese civil war, when gunmen would check id cards to see who was a Muslim, a Christian, a Palestinian, before deciding whether to kill you.

A shopkeeper around the corner describes how Fatah gunmen stormed through his neighbourhood not long ago, firing into the air and harassing him and others for no reason. Gunmen associated with Fatah have a reputation around here for being crazy – they’ll shoot at the slightest provocation.

As the call to prayer echoes over the empty streets at 4:20pm, I can hear exchanges of gunfire.

At night, Abu Ubaida - a field commander from Hama’s Qassam Brigades - speaks to Al-Quds television, Hamas’ own station. His voice is disguised, he’s wearing a mask. He says they fired several Qassam rockets into Israel to bring attention back to the occupation, away from the factional fighting in Gaza. The screen flashes endlessly repeated images of rockets launching into Sderot, Israeli ambulances racing from a house, its roofs partly destroyed.

In the distance, the sound of Israeli shells falling on Deir El Balah and Maghazi. Maybe also on Bait Lahya near the Israeli border. Helicopters are circling over the town.

It’s a surreal situation. I imagine gunmen fighting on a street level (I can still hear small arms) and then an Israeli air air attack. And Fatah and Hamas sitting on their corners wondering who the Israelis are going to bomb next. Tomorrow morning, they’re going to call it a Fatah-Israeli offensive.

Everything goes quiet for a few minutes. I watch the gunmen on the corner of my street as they sit down again, rest against their guns. A dog barks. Some men are seen walking, maybe trying to get home when they think the streets are safe. Then the crack of a gunshot, return fire, everything starts again. The gunmen on the corner stand up, grip their Kalashnikovs to their chests and press their backs against the wall, straining to look around the corner. The guns get heavier as the night goes on. The distant rumble of a bomb.

Tunnel

2007-05-14T21:44:00.000+01:00

Rafah, near the Egyptian border. The Israelis built a wall here, too, along much of the Gaza-Egypt border. It split the town of Rafah in two. Now, partly out of necessity and partly out of greed, tunnels are regularly built between the two sides to smuggle everything from guns to heroin, cigarettes and even people.

Standing facing the wall, a cow’s skull, fixed on a spike, sways in the wind beside me. A small hut has been built directly in front of the wall and teenagers – many of them drug addicts, Fida explains – play billiards under the plastic roof. The shed, she believes, probably hides a tunnel, and the kids work there to get their fix. No one would suspect that it hides the entrance to a tunnel, this innocuous youth centre.

Across the street, a woman is screaming as a large crowd gathers around her. She’s pointing to her house.
“They want to destroy us! They don’t want a country, they want to destroy us for money, to buld a tower! All of this was destroyed because of them!” She motions to the rubble surrounding her. The entrance to a tunnel has just been discovered in ground floor of her house. Her neighbours, and entire row of houses, was already destroyed by Israeli authorities not long ago for the same reason.
“They’re not doing this for weapons for their country, they’re just doing this for money! They’re smuggling hashish and cocaine!” She’s screaming in despair at anyone who will listen to her.

Kids are banging on the door to the house, but the door remains closed. “If you go in,” a little boy says to the camera, “they’ll shoot you and shoot the camera”
Suddenly, there’s a surge as the door is opened from the inside, and dozens of people - mostly curious kids – rush in. They crowd around the entrance to tunnel, pointing, and throw a burning rag down there to light it up. Behind me, people outside begin demolishing the wall with sledge hammers. This is the point at which the neighbourhood turns against the tunnel builders, aware of the dangers, and the violence, the trade brings with it.

Everyone is yelling, some with excitement, some in anger. Outside, a group has gathered on the roof of the building. These are the ones responsible for building the tunnel A crowd on the ground looks up at them, confused, angry. One man on the ground grabs the microphone and tries to rip it out of the camera.
“You filmed my face! Move back! Film from far away!” I replace the microphone and move back to continue filming. Suddenly, while I’m looking at the crowd on the ground, shots are fired from the roof. The crowd scatters, we all hide in the building next door. No one is really sure where the shots are coming from, or who they’re firing at. They’re probably just firing in the air, to scare us all away.

Before long, just as the crowd is beginning to calm down, a new group of gunmen appears. They are Hamas’ Executive Force, the quasi-military, unofficla police force that locals call on to settle local disputes. They are seen by many as the “good guys”, the people you call when your car or mobile phone is stolen. They also tend to be more responsible with their weapons then Fatah’s Preventative Force, known for their eagerness to shoot when things get tense.

The Executive Force all wear masks, stomping around in camouflage and brandishing their Kalashnikovs, while the crowd on the ground argues amongst themselves. Without warning, shots ring out again. It seems like an exchange of fire between the men on the roof and the Executive Force, but it’s impossible to tell because we’ve all taken shelter, again, in the house next door. I’m on the second floor balcony, filming the forces on the ground. Beside me stands my director Laila.

While I’m concentrating on the scene below, a man comes up the stairs behind me and gets my attention. Laila and I turn to face him. His eyes foggy with rage, he demands the tape. I refuse, but he pulls the camera from my hands and tries to eject the tape. I struggle with the camera and try to reason with him when he pulls a gun from his belt and waves it in my face. I let go of the camera, but he keeps the gun in my face.
“Take it, take it,” I say, to reassure him, but he’s not thinking straight. He heads upstairs with the camera and the tape.

Before long, Fida realises the man who stole my camera is her cousin. We follow him for the next ten minutes, pleading with him to give the tape back. A few Hamas men on the ground are claiming I filmed the face of a wanted man – a man with a red beard - and they’re demanding the tape. (Looking back over the footage later, I realise there is no man with a red beard. The man they claim has been the target of two assassination attempts by Israel isn’t on the tape).

When we are eventually given the tape back, we hide it under the ashtray of our taxi. On our way out, however, we’re stopped by another man (the man who originally pulled the microphone from my camera) who, again, demands the tape. This time, through a combination of lies, blank tapes, and panicked phone calls to important contacts, we are allowed to leave, but with the warning “get out of the entire neighbourhood…”

The air is still thick with the haze of burning rubbish. Tonight, it mixes with the stench of burning rubber, a roadblock of tyres in flames built in protest by members of the Abu Aser family. Their son, a man from the Ezzeddin El-Qassam Brigades, was kidnapped by Hamas gunmen. Rifle fire cracks the air, but less often than last night.

Gaza

2007-05-13T21:43:00.000+01:00

Erez has the longest no-man’s land I’ve ever seen. After passing Israeli security, you walk nearly a kilometre through a covered concrete tunnel, nothing but demolished houses and industrial buildings on either side. Reach the car park, and on the drive into town, there’s another kilometre or so of wasteland, shelled beyond all recognition, which no one dares return to.

On the road, visiting the hospital of Musa El-Hadad, our car is stopped by masked gunmen tied to Fatah’s armed Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade. One of their men was killed this morning. In retaliation, they kidnapped several Hamas members.

The streets are deserted. No one dares relax on the sidewalk at night, or take their children out for ice-cream, as they normally would. There is the smell of burning plastic in a haze throughout the neighbourhood – local municipalities stopped collecting rubbish after going unpaid for so long, so locals burn piles of rubbish in the street. All I can see are silhouettes, lit by the fires, flitting past the door to my hotel.

Every few minutes, the sound of gunshots reverberates off the surrounding buildings. A random, paranoid exchange of fire, somewhere in the city. Then silence, the cool Mediterranean breeze. Then more gunshots. Two armed, masked men stand watch in front of my hotel, sitting on breeze blocks, talking to one another. They take little notice of the gunfire. Laila and her parents spoke of it as though it were just something that kept them up at night, like mosquitoes in their bedroom.

His Own Private Yellow Gate

2007-05-06T14:49:00.000+01:00

The last house in the Palestinian village of Masha belongs to a man named Hani Amer, his wife, and his six kids. Hani has become a symbol, through no choice of his own, for his refusal to leave his home. Ten metres behind him, the settlement of Elqana. Ten metres in front of him, the wall. And surrounding his house is a heavily secured military zone. Hani can, when the military allows him, pass through the small yellow gate that is his only access to the outside world.

Even then, he has nowhere to go. He has no job, his farm has been destroyed. He can’t go to the centre of Masha because he has no money. Even if he could, the centre of Masha is virtually dead since Israel moved the main road, a settler-only road, a few hundred metres away.

People talk about the wall as trapping Palestinians in a cage. In Hani’s case, it’s a reality, not a metaphor.

He opens the yellow gate, wired with motion detectors, and invites us into his home. He sits in his chair in the front room, looking out at the mural that has been painted on the wall. There is no other view. He explains carefully that he's been living in his house since 1973. At that time, there was nothing around. He could easily walk for six or seven kilometres around his own fields. The settlement was built in the 1980's. Since then, he has faced pressure and abuse in an attempt to force him out. The settlers throw stones, breaking windows and the solar panels that heat his water, and insult his family.

Then the military came, and began construction of the wall in 2003.
"When they came to build the wall, they said I have two choices. Either we keep it like this, in front of your house, or we demolish your house and put the wall in its place. I told them you've given me no choices. I have a third option, better than the others. I said 'build the wall between me and the settlement.'"

In the end, they refused. It would have ruined the view from the settler's houses.

His farm storage units were demolished. In 1990 the new extension to his house was destoyed. In 2003 his orchards were destoyed. His water storage tank was torn down. He has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment in a chicken farm. He was once one of the richest men in his village. "Today," he says "I don't have a single shekel for my kids."

He locks his hands together, and looks down at his feet when he talks. He says he has to stay alert 24 hours a day, keeping an eye out for settlers and soldiers. The Israeli military routinely enter his home, armed and unannounced, and ask him who’s been visiting, what he was doing outside, when he’s going to leave. Theirmost recent visit was last night, at 2:30am. They asked him how old he was,
“Fifty,” he replied
“Do you want to keep fighting to 100? Why don’t you just die? Let your children leave this place…”

But Hani isn’t doing this to be a martyr. He doesn’t feel he’s fighting the Palestinian cause. He feels he's simply staying on his land, in his home. Originally from 1948 Palestine, the village of Kufr Qasim, he came to the West Bank as a refugee.
He has no choice, nowhere else to go.

On our way out, he asks one thing, the one thing that many Palestinians have asked of us. "Send this story to the rest of the word. Tell them the truth."

There Is No Reason

2007-05-04T18:30:00.000+01:00

The workshops continue, and life outside The Valley of Peace goes on as usual. Inside, we can talk about peace and reconciliation. We can dicsuss photography and compliment good efforts. Outside, Aisha's brothers are still in prison.

I find her in the corner of the balcony trying to look inconspicuous.
"My brothers just had their second trial," she says under her breath.
"What happened?"
"They'll stay in prison until at least July, and then another trial."
She explained they had been arrested in the middle of the night, during my last visit to Jerusalem in January, on suspicion of planting a bomb. But Aisha's brother says as soon as he heard someone was planning an attack, he left. He had nothing to do with it. There's little evidence, but until the issue is settled, both her brothers remain in prison.

Aisha is afraid. "You can go home," I tell her, "If you need to. There's no reason to stay here..."
"What worries me," she answers, "is that the same thing will happen to my kids. I have small children, and I'm afriad that one night the Israelis will come to our house and arrest them, just like they took my brothers."

She sees the kids in this project like her own children. She loves them like they were her own, and it's clear she wants the best for them. She insists on being in the same room, though we offered her a private room. One night, at around 1am, I find all the Palestinian kids - boys and girls - walking with her from their rooms to a clearing in the woods around the guest house.
"Come with us!" she offers, "they're going out to dance."
"Don't you want to sleep?" I ask her, knowing she's exhausted
"Well, they want me to come with them," she explains. She is a mother to them all, some of whom have lost parents of their own, one assassinated, one accidentally shot during military incursions.

She just wants to find a breakthrough, she explains later of her reasons for joining this project. She simply wants to get this boy to talk, or this girl to sit next to an Israeli and have a normal conversation, or this boy to be the kid he once was before his father was killed. She doesn't think about herself, it's clear, she thinks about them and their own futures.

As Mazen says to us on the final morning "I don't want you to think like me, I want you to think for yourselves. I just want you to think about your futures, that's it."