Made in Palestine is a documentary short that presents a charming portrait of Hirbawi Textiles in Hebron, the last remaining factory in Palestine that produces the traditional Palestinian scarf known as the kuffiyeh.
We spoke with director Mariam Dwedar about how she came to make this film and what she took away from the experience.
BPFF: How did you get into filmmaking and producing?
MD: After I finished my master’s, I got a job at Human Rights Watch, and I ended up working in multimedia. I had always been interested in art and visuals and creativity, but that’s where I got a lot of practice, because it was a very small team. It’s actually very self-taught with some mentorship and practice. It was a great place to start, because I ended up meeting a lot of freelance filmmakers, and it was work on topics that “matter” and it was international, so I got to travel.
I’ve been freelancing over five years now, because I wanted to pursue my own projects, but also, whenever you work for an international human rights organization, the consequences are a lot graver if you get something wrong and it really impacts lives. Therefore, [my work] would have to go through rounds of review and then it often ended up being formulaic. Such work serves its purpose, and those videos are important, but I wanted to branch out and so, through freelancing, I’ve worked on a whole spectrum of projects and it’s been amazing. In general, I think storytelling and visuals are so important and it’s something that I personally like to do.
BPFF: Your work definitely has an international bent. How did you get interested in Palestine and the Hirbawi factory?
MD: I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which has a large Arab population. I had a few good friends who were Palestinian, and also just growing up, my dad is from Egypt and he and my family are Muslim. So, as Muslims and Arabs, everyone kind of grows up with this idea of Palestine. It’s a presence in your life growing up, but it wasn’t something that I read into that much or was very passionate about.
Then I took an international human rights course in college, and I had to write a 25-page research paper. The work was really intense, and the paper had to be about human rights violations. I thought, “human rights violations are happening in Palestine, I’ll write about that.” I ended up reading a lot about Palestine in a very short time. This was around 2008, and there was an attack on Gaza soon after. So I became very active in the Palestine arena. I knew a bunch of activists and was part of the Palestine club in college. It was a revelation to me, and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know about the level of human rights abuses there, and that all these atrocities were happening—I just had no idea, and at the time, honestly, probably didn’t care.
Eventually, after years of being involved in Palestine activism and becoming passionate about the issue, I actually went to Palestine in 2012 or 2013 and eventually I went to Hebron and visited the factory. The looms are so beautiful, and they’re super old, from Japan, 1950s, and really loud—so loud you almost can’t talk in there. I met the three brothers who run the place who were working there, the Hirbawis—Judeh, Ezzat, and Abdul Azeem. II’d just gone in to buy a kuffiyeh, and I spent a lot of time in the downtown area, too. It was a huge eye opener for me. You read a lot about Hebron, but when you are actually there and you see the grates that they have to put over the shops, the plastic bags… It’s tense there; people on the street just want to talk to you about it.
The three Hirbawi brothers were so nice and welcoming that I actually ended up spending the day there. They let me take a few pictures of them and the factory, and we had tea together. I thought, it’s so visual and it’s such a symbol of Palestine that I always wanted to come back and do something. So after I had gone freelance, and I had been shooting a lot of other people’s projects, I began moving more in the direction of directing my own personal work, and I thought, let me go back there because it was always something that remained in my mind. I thought it lent itself to the theme of Palestine and cultural heritage. Inevitably anything to do with Palestine is political, so it touches upon the occupation and everything. That’s how I ended up going back.
BPFF: How long was the time between your first visit and returning to film, and how long did filming take?
MD: It was in March 2018, five years after I had first visited, and I filmed for five or six days.
BPFF: How was filming in Hebron? What is the city like, and what effect has the Israeli occupation had on it?
MD: Hebron is a very tense city—highly militarized. The occupation is very present, and the city is divided into Palestinian and Israeli territory. When I filmed there, since so much of the film was happening inside the factory, it was fine. I think probably filming on the street would have been an issue. Even though I speak Arabic, I’m not from Palestine. In my work, generally whenever you travel, you rely on local people, and so I worked with a fixer there, just in case. She helped getting me there, but the majority of the filming took place inside [the factory]. And when I did film outside, it was usually in the Palestinian-administered territory, so it wasn’t a big deal. There’s a piece in the film where you see a guard come out from the top of this checkpoint, because you’re technically not allowed to film checkpoints, but I just thought let me try and see what happens—and then it was only a few seconds long. I managed to get that. Even for the footage that you see inside the checkpoint—I actually wasn’t looking in the viewfinder at the time. I was just holding the camera and recording, so I wasn’t sure what I would get, but it ended up being usable. They actually saw me holding the camera and yelled at me that I wasn’t allowed to film. So I’m not sure what it’s like in the Israeli-administered side, but on the Palestinian side, it was actually pretty easy.
BPFF: How does the Israel occupation affect the Hirbawis at their factory, and the industry in which they work? In the film, the brothers mention that it is difficult to sell to vendors in Hebron because the city is on many accounts a ghost town in terms of economic activity, and they rely on trade throughout the greater West Bank and Internationally.
MD: Initially when I went to make this film, it was going to be with their dad, Yasser Hirbawi, who actually opened the factory. I think he was in his 80s or 90s; he’d bought the initial looms. He used to go to I think Syria to buy kuffiyehs and then would sell them in Palestine before he opened this factory. He’s the one who originally bought the machines from Japan and imported and started with a few at first that eventually grew into more. As an older person, he also has seen so much of the history of Palestine. I thought he could provide all this insight about the business as well as on the history of Palestine and the conflict on a parallel level, but he was actually ill when I got there, so my access was limited. Whenever I tried to talk about anything political or figure out the situation in Hebron, they were not very willing to speak about it, which is indicative on its own. They know that this is going to go out into the world and that they can’t say anything that might be interpreted the wrong way or be held against them, because they could be shut down at any moment. So, they’re producing this big, this huge symbol of resistance—It’s such a big part of Palestinian culture—In the tensest city in Palestine, so it’s more difficult for them. And I think they were treading really carefully so I didn’t actually get a lot on that front.
In terms of selling in the city, you see footage of all these shuttered shops on this one street called Shuhada Street (Martyrs’ Street) so it used to be 400-500 businesses that would sell openly and they were all shut down by the Israeli government. Obviously that cripples a lot of economic activity there, which is also a part of this whole mechanism of occupation against Palestinians. The shops that they would sell in before are no longer available. And so, they have to rely on tourists. I think a Dutch group met them a few years ago and set up a website to open up this potential to sell internationally via the Internet because online shopping was booming so much at the time. I think it actually helped save them, because they are getting competition from synthetically made kuffiyehs from China, which are much cheaper. So they faced a lot of competition and were shut down for a few years. I think they were on the verge of shutting down again when this group helped them post things online. I think a pretty good percentage of their sales are actually shipped internationally today.
BPFF: What did they tell you about how globalization had impacted them? And has there been any sort of rejuvenation at all in manufacturing sector in in Palestine?
MD: The factory was opened by Yasser Hirbawi, and it’s now being run by three of his sons. They are hoping that their kids will take over to continue the business, but it is a lot of hard work and it’s an unsure market because of globalization. There’s the competition that they face from China, and just from cheaper goods generally and from having to try to find ways to keep it going. I don’t know that the brothers are actually involved in that sort of movement, and their kids are pretty young. So they’re in that generation that I don’t think is as much tapped into the internet. I know they do want their kids to continue doing it, but wonder, “Is this something feasible for them to do? Can they feed their families with it?”
But it’s also work that requires a lot of practice and experience. So Abdul Aziz, who is in the film, has been working with the factory for around 50 years. To train people takes around like three years. It’s a learned skill that takes a large time commitment and also, those machines, because of the way that they work, can’t churn out as many kuffiyehs as newer ones might be able to. So, I honestly don’t know what the fate of that factory will be. If it was actually on the verge of closing and the family had no other options, I feel that somebody would inevitably intervene to make sure that it stays open.
BPFF: You mentioned the looms and the process of manufacturing a kuffiyeh. The patterns are very intricate, and different patterns have different meanings to different people. Can you share more?
MD: I hope I do justice to explaining the process, because it is such a skill! I think they buy several rolls or spools of small thread that’s eventually rolled into a really big one that’s the base color. So, for example, they’ll have a really big spool of white thread that they put into the machine and then there’s several smaller spools attached to the actual Japanese looms that put the design on. I think they said they can make maybe 15 to 20 kuffiyehs if the machine is run all day. And it requires a lot of monitoring. So if the machine actually stops working, somebody has to fix it by hand. That happened a couple of times while we were there, and then you just have to keep track as every kuffiyeh comes out, because there are areas where you would cut—because the thread is continuous—so you just have to cut it to keep that square pattern going. Once that’s done. It’s basically several kuffiyehs put into this one roll that they then take to another place where people will cut them into the separate pieces and then sew the tassels on and sew on the little label that says Made in Palestine, fold them, package them in the plastic, and then bring them back to the store where they’ll either sell them at the store to tourists or ship them out internationally. In terms of the design—and this is all speculation—I don’t know that there’s a consensus, but the red one is typically seen as more Jordanian, and has the square pattern, and then the black-and-white one is the classic Palestinian scarf that was popularized by Yasser Arafat. The design that’s in the middle, that sort of chain-link fence—some people say it represents the occupation, like this fence that’s holding in the Palestinians. Some people say like it’s a fishnet, because so many people who used to wear the kuffiyeh were fisherman. As for the squiggly designs on the edges, people say they’re like olive branches. There are just a lot of theories and no consensus! Some people even say that the chain-link type of design is actually what Palestinian DNA looks like, because kuffiyehs are such a part of Palestinians!
BPFF: Did you research any of the history behind the kuffiyeh? Palestine has such a rich history in textiles itself, did you get a sense of this history—how the kuffiyeh started and its evolution?
MD: I did, and I’m sure there are experts with the definitive answer, but I’ll let you know what I’ve gathered: It seems the kuffiyeh originated in the city called Kufa, in Iraq, and that generally a lot of people who work in the climates that you find in the Middle East, like the desert or farmers or Bedouin, would wear kuffiyehs to protect themselves from the sun and dust. So it was typically seen as a lower-class type of attire, something that mostly working-class people wore.
In 1936, when the British were occupying Palestine, they said that anyone who wore a kuffiyeh was expressing opposition to to the British Administration. After that, a lot of people ended up wearing kuffiyehs just to try to conceal who the rebels were and weren’t. Then it became associated with this resistance against Britain and colonialism and then with the continuing resistance against the Israeli occupation in Palestine now.
BPFF: What did you take away from the film? And what do you hope audiences will see in it?
MD: This goes back to the initial question you asked me. I forgot to add that after becoming really passionate about Palestine and living in the New York area, that generally, in recent years, maybe since the occupation started, there’s a lot of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian culture—everything from food, to attire, to language. It’s a way to try to erase Palestinians and their culture and make it seem like they never existed. I find that really frustrating, because Israel has only existed since 1948 and a lot of these things—kuffiyehs, food, all these cultural things—have existed since before then. Part of my motivation was this resistance to appropriation, because in New York, you see it so much everywhere you go, Palestinian food is labeled Israeli, and everyone’s celebrating it as if no one knows the actual history of the food. There was this thing, I think Urban Outfitters or some designer had produced like a dress or some version of a kuffiyeh, and it was another level of appropriation.
I wanted to make a film about this amazing factory where all the work is handmade on these beautiful old Japanese looms and where, despite globalization, occupation, and the risk of being shut down, they continue to produce this hugely iconic Palestinian symbol. I wanted to make a time capsule in a way, to appreciate the work of these people but also to create this piece in this time that is adding to this collection of things that are Palestinian historically to contribute to that type of preservation.
What did I take away? I had my own thoughts about the kuffiyeh as a symbol of resistance before I actually went there, and it is so huge—you see it at every protest. Sometimes even in protests outside the Middle East, you’ll see kuffiyehs, it’s so intertwined with this idea of resistance now. This also goes back to what they felt like they could or couldn’t say. I asked them [the Hirbawis], how does it feel to make such a huge symbol of resistance? They replied no, we don’t do anything with resistance. We’re just a small business. We just make these things. Personally, I’m sure they recognize all the symbolism and everything but publicly, they can’t advertise that, because if it makes a splash of any kind or seems like it’s inspiring people, it’ll probably be shut down. I just gained an appreciation for the amount of work that goes into it and the value of getting a kuffiyeh from Palestine that’s made by these Palestinians whom I’m sure put into it feelings that actually make it a really special thing.
BPFF: Can you tell us about future projects?
MD: I’m working on a show for Netflix now that’s about big data, and how these various things around the world are connected through big data, and it’s fascinating. I’ve worked on a lot of TV and documentary projects, but this is different, it’s a show, and I feel like I learn so much every time on I’m on each shoot. We have shoots on different topics in various places. I was in Chad recently working on the episode about dust, and yesterday on the episode about nukes, and actually the shoot that I’m leaving for today is about clouds and supercomputers. The show should be out in early summer 2020. Then generally, I’m also working on a personal project in Iraq. It would be my first feature, and I’ve been going back and forth to Iraq to work on that. Otherwise, I’m just freelancing.
BPFF: What is it like to be a freelance producer and filmmaker? Do you do this all solo, with a team, or both?
MD: Unpredictable. Everything across the board is unpredictable. I had a structured job for such a long time, and then going freelance was a challenge for me in the beginning because you lose your routine and you have to try to be as disciplined as possible with your own schedule and figure out ways to stay productive when you’re not working.
BPFF: Thank you for speaking with us today.
Made in Palestine re-screens Saturday, October 26, 2018 at 3 pm at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston preceding The Apollo of Gaza.
View the full festival schedule and buy tickets here.