Mais Darwazah: “I Wanted to Find the Dream Palestine of Today”

150 150 Boston Palestine Film Festival

“What I found so powerful about Hasan’s world was that his beautiful dream was still part of reality….I wasn’t trying to find the Palestine of ’48, I wanted to find the dream Palestine of today. From there, this journey started.” Mais Darwazah talks about her latest foray as a director.

Mais Darwazah Image {via}

Film synopsis: My Love Awaits Me by the Sea is a poetic documentary narrating the story of director Mais Darwazah, who takes a first-time journey back to her homeland, Palestine. She leaves a secluded reality and follows a lover whom she has never met: Hasan, a Palestinian artist, who unveils a dreamlike world to her. Fairytale and reality are woven together to question the elusiveness of place and affirm the importance of believing in ones imagination.

The film pays tribute to Hasan Hourani, a Palestinian artist who, through his illustrations, rises above the Occupation.

 

 

 Hasan Hourani | From Hasan Everywhere 2001 | Bir Zeit University Virtual Galler y| {Image via }

Throughout the film, both worlds of dream and reality provoke one another, to ask the questions: ‘How do you return to a place that only exists in your mind?’ ‘How do you keep fighting for life when you’re surrounded by so much death?’ ‘How can you continue believing in a dream when the outside world lives another reality?’ And ‘how can you own your version of the truth when history has taken it from you?’

BPFF spoke with Darwazah to learn more about the film and why she made it.

BPFF: What was the process like for the making of My Love Awaits Me by the Sea? Where did it start and how did it end?

MD: The subject of this documentary is something I have experienced since I was born. Living in a diaspora, the idea of living away from your home, Palestine, a place you don’t know except for in stories, means this film started in my early days. At this point five years ago, even before I saw Hasan [Hourani’]s work, I felt that I needed to face my relationship with Palestine to be able to go on with my story to see what it means to me.

I came across Hasan Hourani’s book, Hasan Everywhere. His voice, illustrations, and poetry made me freeze when I read them. His voice was the voice I had been searching for. He spoke from a very simple human emotional angle; very creative – the simplicity of the emotion in his work was something I was so hungry to hear and see in Palestine. We are faced with big stories like the intifada; we don’t know the small voices of Palestine.

I immediately knew when I saw the book that I would make a film. I knew it wouldn’t be a straight artist portrait but something more. What I found so powerful about Hasan’s world was that his beautiful dream was still part of reality. Finding a dream in a real world became the subject of the film. I wasn’t trying to find the Palestine of ’48, I wanted to find the dream Palestine of today. From there, this journey started.

BPFF: How did you start working on the film?

MD: I took my first trip to Palestine to get rid of the stereotypes I grew up with…I wanted to be very spontaneous. Palestinians are scared sometimes to admit we don’t know our homeland. How could we? This film liberated me from that fear.

I’m from Nablus but my father is from Yafa, but the beauty of diaspora is that you can choose anywhere in Palestine and go back to it. It is all ours. The diaspora can be something liberating. We have the chance to discuss what a country means, what a state means, what love means for a country we never visited except in our dreams.

I sat editing the film for a year on and off, but I was with the material for more than that. Even today, in every screening, I watch the film, engrossed in the emotion of it. The film hasn’t stopped; the questions I went out to answer are still out there.

Throughout the process of making the film, my mother passed away. The situation in Syria, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world became very difficult. It is inspiring to see someone seeking a beautiful world, but, as a writer, it can only exist in a world that you construct that you imagine – that you dream of.

In my film, I talk to the boys in Akka who jump in the sea from the Wall of Akka. That moment is very liberating, but that moment also pains me. Today, I’m unable to find those emotions, they are harder to find, especially with the revolutions and how they affected the people in Palestine. It made us realize how difficult the journey is towards liberation. We need to find a new relationship with hope.

BPFF: What projects are you working on now?

MD: My next project is not going to be a big budget film. For my next project, I want to be more independent…I’m challenging myself all the time to be freer.

BPFF: Have you spoken to Hasan’s family?

MD: Yes, of course. I had an interesting conversation with Hasan’s brother, Khalid Hourani; he told me something that made me cry. The Houranis have been amazing with me; they became like my family in Palestine. I had such a responsibility to be true to his legacy. Khalid, [himself an artist], said, “You made me understand my brother in a new way. I never realized Hasan’s work is so rooted in reality.” I was very careful not to say that my film is an absolute way to view this artist’s work. This is my reading of this artist’s work.

BPFF: You use a lot of animation, drawing, watercolor, and photos in your film. How does the multi-media add to your work?

Sketch rendering from My Love Awaits Me By the Sea | Image {via}

MD: All the drawings and photos spoke to me. I was trying to understand why I chose this old photo of my mother. She was very sick as I was making the film, so seeing her in that photo where she is healthy was very painful for me. What happens when you long for something that isn’t there is that you miss out on reality. It’s like freezing someone in a different time; it’s unfair to that person.

Maybe I could have learned how to love my mother the way she was when she was sick. It is similar to our relationship with Palestine. Can we learn to love her while she is sick, or would we only recognize the nostalgic version of her?

As for the watercolors, I want the viewer to be experiencing the creation with me. I’m trying to say, “Look, you saw me create Hasan, you believed in him, you went and found your own Hasan, and if you can do that you can create and believe in Palestine, and not just Palestine, you can believe in the world you want, the utopian world you seek.”

The sea as this space means so many things to different people. The sea is freedom, but maybe that’s not the same thing for everyone. Each person needs to define what freedom means to him or her. Everyone, as a human, has an issue they are struggling with.

BPFF: What did the different characters in the film mean to you?

MD: Each character I stop at means something different. Secretly, each character is poem from Hasan’s work. Mohammad was the traveller. Hasan has a story about the exiled sea palm. He talks about the story of a sea palm who got exiled into the sea. Hasan is walking and he came across a palm tree in the middle of the sea and she gave him some dates. “Tell my people I’m okay,” the palm tree says, “take these three dates and plant them in the land where I was born.” On the day I shot with Mohammad, he was wearing a shirt with a palm tree in the middle of the sea on it, just by chance. It’s those little magic moments that remind you it’s worth it because the process is so difficult. I felt they were little gifts from Hasan telling me to keep going.

–Munir Atalla for BPFF

My Love Awaits Me By the Sea screens on October 23, 2014 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at 7:30 pm. Director Mais Darwazah will attend the screening and converse with the audience following the film. Buy Tickets

About Hasan Hourani

Hasan Hourani was born in 1974 in Hebron. In 1992, he graduated from secondary school there and went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. An Iraqi television crew filmed his graduating project, What Remains, as a 35-minute documentary. On his return to Ramallah in 1997, he taught art and worked in the Wassiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem.

Hourani, a prolific painter, participated in exhibitions of young Palestinian artists in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. His works were awarded first and second place at art festivals in Ramallah in 1993 and in Jerusalem in 2000. In 2001, he arrived in New York where he had a one-man show “One Day, One Night” in the United Nations building. In 2003, he returned home for a visit. Like nearly all West Bank Palestinians, he had been barred from traveling across the Green Line to see the sea for many years; but during this trip home, he was able to visit the Mediterranean shore. On August 6, 2003 he and his young nephew snuck out of the West Bank and went swimming in Yafa. Neither knew how to swim, and when the nephew began to drown, Hourani attempted to rescue him and also drowned at the young age of 29. He had completed the stories but on only 10 of the 40 drawings that make up his children’s book, Hasan Everywhere. The next year, the A.M. Qattan Foundation published the book and also established the Hasan Hourani Young Artist of the Year Award. Hasan Everywhere won one of ten children’s book prizes at the Cairo International Book Fair in 2009. Learn more about Hourani here , here, and here.