Amer Shomali: “For Me, Making this Film Meant Rebelling Against What a Documentary ‘Should’ Look Like—a Creative Process to Reflect the Spirit of the First Intifada”

150 150 Boston Palestine Film Festival

 is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist who uses painting, digital media, films, installations, and comics as tools to explore and interact with the sociopolitical scene in Palestine focusing on the creation and the use of Palestinian revolution iconography. He spoke with us recently about the making of his innovative, award-winning film, which re-imagines the from the perspective of 18 cows.

BPFF: The Wanted 18 is a unique film that integrates animation, claymation, comic strips, sketches, and much more. Can you tell us how you first came to that vision, and what impact your own work as an artist had on it?

AS: Basically, we started from the point that we wanted the cows to be the main character, so we wanted to give the cows a voice. I always thought it is easier in the West to sympathize with a cow rather than sympathize with a Palestinian. So that is our main starting point, to make the cows the central characters so they lead you into the journey, and while sympathizing with the cows, you begin to understand what it means to live under occupation.

Of course, real cows don’t act and they don’t do dialogue, so we had to do it via animation. So the starting point was the animated cows.

Then the interviews, of course, because most of our partners and editors said, we need to see the real faces of the people in this story, otherwise it will be a take on the Intifada that is like a fantastical animal farm. No one will believe it is true. So we added the interviews.

And then the rest came to just fill the lack of proper archives. Most of the archives we have about the first Intifada cover only the violent side—throwing stones, breaking bones, Molotov cocktails, killing Palestinians, crying mothers—that is what was interesting for the media at that time. But none of the media agencies would film a Palestinian milking a cow, or planting his back yard, or feeding a chicken, or growing vegetables in front of his house. None of that was available on camera. So most of that, we had to recreate in drama, in drawings, in animation—as if we were creating an alternative archival footage to portray Palestinians in a different way than the images that were forced on them by the media agencies.

Initially, when it was just a script on paper, people said that this film cannot be made; it is a salad plate with so many mediums. People will lose track, because you will keep jumping from one medium to another. I admit it was a risk, and we did not actually know it would work until we finished the film. The key was adding the sketches and my voice, the narrative voice, which made a balance and smoothed the transition between all those mediums. And then a magical thing happened: The archival footage made the animation look more real, so when you see the puppet character and the same character in real life, that made the animation more real, and at the same time, it made the interviews and the archival footage more integrated into the fantasy world. The result was kind of a magical atmosphere, like a utopian imaginary place.

For me, it was an interesting thing to represent the Intifada in this non-classical form of a documentary—something out of the box, something rebellious—kind of the same spirit of the Intifada. The Intifada was a non-classical form of resistance. It was a creative process. For me, making this film was also a creative process, something to reflect the spirit of the Intifada. Rebelling against what is classical or against what a documentary “should” look like.

BPFF: How did you become an artist? And did you do all the arts—claymation, animation, sketches—in the film yourself?

AS: I did the sketches and the comic books drawings. I worked also on the character design. But the animation was done with another 15 animators who worked together for a whole year. It is a lot of work.

I didn’t “become” an artist. Artists, pathetically, don’t know how to do anything else. They are just born artists. I grew up, and this is what I knew what to do. Lately, I’ve I started to enjoy it. As an artist, you always look at yourself as paralyzed, because you don’t know how to do other stuff. But you start to enjoy what you do know how to do, which is looking into the world with a new perspective and fresh points of view and try to reform that and talk about this point of view in a different and creative way to show the world what you see. So for me, being an artist is not a choice.

I went off track for a long time, because studying art was not acceptable for my family. They felt I should be a doctor like my mother, or an engineer like my father. They kept pushing me away from art. Therefore, I went to architectural school. After that, I had the chance to work on children’s comic books and storybooks, and gradually I got back to the right track. I studied animation in Canada, then I did my Master’s in Fine Arts in England. After that, I started to work on the film and other artistic projects, to have my own exhibits around the world. So it took me a while to get me back on the right track, even though I knew since I was a kid that I wanted to be an artist.

BPFF: Have your parents come around to respect the value of what you do?

AS: Lately they have. I think my parents like what I do, but they were worried I would not be able to eat. I understand their point of view.

At the end, when I finished architecture, it was actually a traffic jam that got me back on track, which is quite interesting. I had just finished university and I was going from Bir Zeit to Ramallah to buy a shirt for my graduation party. On the way, I got stuck in a traffic jam. So the driver went a different route.

We were standing still in traffic, and from the window I happened to see a woman who works at Bir Zeit University. She knew that I draw and do comics for local magazines. She waved to me and said, “Come down.” So I did, and she said, “Are you still drawing now and then?” I said, yes. She said, “What are you up to?” I told her I just graduated and I am on the way to Bethlehem to start working in an engineering office. She said, “Do you want to work at Bir Zeit?” I said, “Doing what?” She replied, “Creating comic books and children’s books and so on.” I answered, yes! So she called the university and they gave me a salary and a contract. I went to Ramallah and bought a shirt and the next day, I was working as a full-time artist doing comics for Bir Zeit University. So a traffic jam changed my life.

BPFF: It was fate.

AS: Yes, it was fate.

BPFF: We talked about how you came to the art aspect of the film. How did you come to the story aspect? What gave you this idea?

AS: I am from the same town as the one in the movie, Beit Sahour, and I grew up in a refugee camp in Syria. At that time, I was obsessed with reading comic books. I used to spend most of my time indoors reading comic books. Some of the comic books were about Palestine and the Intifada. For me, that was source that I used to build the image of what Palestine looks like. Most refugees do that—they have an image of Palestine based on the paintings and the posters they see about Palestine, so fields of oranges and olive trees and the sea, and this is how they imagine Palestine.

Those comic books I read kept telling stories about the first Intifada. So I built a utopian image of Palestine in my mind, which looked like a comic book. At that time, I used to read a lot of superhero comics—Superman, Batman, Tam Tam, Asterix—and for me to read comics about Palestine, and especially that one about my town, Beit Sahour—I felt that those superheroes for the first time could be my relatives—my uncles, my cousins—so in one way or another, I could be a superhero myself by bloodline, at least.

So I built this utopian image. But when I went back to Palestine in 1997, nothing was the way I imagined. I was expecting a community where the young people are involved, and they are always talking about the political situation and Palestine and a better future. And I came to a place where everyone is obsessed with consumerism, their new car, new mobile phone, etc., and it was a big disappointment for me.

At one point, I met one of the characters in the film who told me, “Whatever you imagined about Palestine was true. But you just came at the wrong moment. You just missed it all.” So for me, making this film was like revisiting the Intifada—interviewing those people over the five years, animating those stories, making drawings about it, reenacting those stories in front of the camera—gave me the chance to live those times which I missed in one way or another. And for me, making the film was magical. It was the monitor we used to look at, looking into the monitor while we were shooting was something like magical window, as if we were looking back at the Intifada.

BPFF: How did the story change over the course of the filming? Did things happen within the encounters you had with people that made the story evolve?

AS: Basically I knew the main structure of the story, but I did not have the minor stories. People started to feed me with little vignettes that gave me the feeling of what it meant for them to live under occupation and in the time of the Intifada. I took those stories and tried to portray them as honestly as possible. The main structure of events was clear, but adding those little detailed stories about how life was during the Intifada was very essential. I did not live in Palestine during the Intifada. I did not want to be an Orientalist making a film about Palestinians. I wanted to give them a platform to tell me what they wanted to show the world about their lives. So I gave them that space, and they got involved and came to us daily. They would say, “Ah, you are the ‘cows people’? Let me tell you this story…” Then we liked the story, so we would shoot it on the spot. So it was an improvisation. We knew the main events we wanted to have, but they added a lot of details spontaneously.

BPFF: How about the archival footage—where did you find that?

AS: Most of the official news archives are related to the violent side of the Intifada and nothing to do with milking cows or the civil disobedience movement.

BPFF: Did you actually go to news archives and look?

AS: Yes. I looked all over—the Associated Press and the Israeli TV—all over. A lot of the Intifada archives were actually destroyed when they moved from the analogue to the digital. It was not worth it for them, so they just threw it away. They kept only major things, which for them are the scenes of throwing stones and violence.

We started to ask in the town if people have home videos or if they had visitors during that time who filmed. People started to come to us and show us their home videos. And they gave us the addresses of the people who had visited them from Chile, from the US, France, and all over. We started to contact those people and checked if they still had the footage from when they were in Palestine. So most of the footage we used was from people who came to Beit Sahour and stayed here in Palestine, in solidarity. It was interesting and different footage—from someone who films Palestinians with love. Not a news agency, but rather someone who is passionate and wants to show the real face of Palestinians. This is how we got the footage.

BPFF: Can you describe the experience of filming under Israeli occupation and how you got the interviews with the [Israeli] military personnel?

The interview with the military was quite bizarre. We kept trying to get access to the military archives and to do the interviews with them. It never worked. We did not get permission for a long time.

Eventually we hired an Israeli researcher and she advised us to reapply as a Canadian film crew. We sent the Canadian crew straight to Tel Aviv, all white people, and they did the interview for an hour and a half with each of the guys. They had a list of questions, general things, and things related to our film. And we took the parts we needed for our film. But it just came at the last moment, the last day of shooting.

BPFF: Other than that interview, were there any difficulties due to filming under occupation?

AS: The major thing was that the day before we were due to start shooting, they raided the house of our props master and they took the military jeep, the uniforms, and the plastic guns. We were stuck in a position had to shoot the next day without those. So I had to change the shooting schedule. At that point, people from the town of Beit Sahour called around to see if anyone they know had a similar type of jeep. They brought us one, but it was black. So they repainted it green. They also brought green fabrics and asked a guy to sew them into Israeli army uniforms. It was a magical thing that they could save the [film] shooting.

BPFF: As we see The Wanted 18 in these days, it is particularly relevant because all of the upheaval that is happening in Palestine. How does the film of the first Intifada tie in with the events on the ground today?

AS: It is very essential nowadays for the young generation to see such a film. The media only portrays the Intifada as throwing stones. For the new generation now, they want to express their anger and their frustration, and they are losing hope, so they will undertake a third Intifada. For them, making an Intifada is only reproducing the images they have about the Intifada.

But the Intifada was way more than just throwing stones and protesting. It was trying to substitute and replace the structure of the occupation with a Palestinian structure. Instead of buying Israeli food, which Israel used as a tool for collective punishment—whenever the Israelis wanted to impose a curfew, they would use supplying food as a tool for collective punishment. So people said, we are not going to give this tool to the Israelis, we are going to start farming and planting our back yards to produce our own food in our own back yards—bring a few chickens, rabbits, and make our own milk with the cows. Then whatever the Israelis will do, we can survive without them giving us food.

And they did the same on many levels. One was also medicine. Before, any time a Palestinian would get shot and go to the hospital, the hospital would inform the Israelis that there was an injured Palestinian and the Israelis would promptly show up and arrest him from the hospital. So the doctors started to treat the injured in their own houses and create local clinics in each neighborhood. They started to replace the health system, the municipalities, and the education system, because the Israelis closed the schools. So they started to have home schooling for the neighborhood.

The Intifada was not all protesting and throwing stones. It was a well-organized movement to replace every aspect of the occupation’s control over our lives. And for me, that was what made the first Intifada very powerful and almost got us freedom and independence, and that was what I hoped to convey in The Wanted 18.

screens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on Sunday, October 18 at 2:30 pm. Amer Shomali will be attending and will converse with the audience following the film.

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