We talked with Hind Shoufani about the making of her film, Trip Along Exodus, which was born out of a desire to solve the mystery of what her father, Dr. Elias Shoufani, had done with his life—why he had chosen to give up a tenured position at a US university and move back to the Levant to join the Palestine Liberation Organization. Through trying to tell her father’s story, she learned so much more.
BPFF: How did you first discover about your father’s political role, and what inspired you to make this film?
HS: I think one of the things that happened growing up was that there was always a sense of mystery about my dad. Things were always coming at me in bits and pieces. Without a real sense of what he was doing.
BPFF: Where were you when you were growing up?
HS: We were together in Lebanon the first four years, but not really together because he was always away—partly in Sidon, partly in Beirut. Then in 1982, when I was four, my mother said, “enough of this [living under bombs]. I am taking the girls to Jordan where we have relatives.” So we moved to Jordan for three years, but my father was in Syria. We only saw him every few months. In 1985, we joined him in Syria, and then I lived in Syria until 1995, then I went off to Beirut, New York, Dubai…. etc.
But overall, in the first 17-18 years of my life, I did not really have a very clear idea of what my father was doing. And it was actually friends in university in Lebanon who told me about my father’s reputation and first spoke the Arabic words to describe his job in Fatah.
And I was astounded that they knew who my father was. I knew he was a leader of some sort—that we had bodyguards, and people stationed outside of our house, and we got cars, and we had people answering our phone… I knew that he was very stressed half the time, and that he disappeared into his office and wrote. But I also knew that he was an academic man, he was a writer, a historian, a translator—he was an extremely learned person.
But I think my father shielded us from the realities of politics as much as possible in a very strange way. He imbued in us a sense of resistance and a sense of Palestinianhood, and we were exposed a lot to the camps, and to the people in the camps, and to all the social activities of the camps—we used to take dabke classes, and my Mom worked with the women there—so we were totally familiar with the concept of Palestinian refugeehood and occupation. But I could not have answered basic political questions about what was the difference between Fatah and the West Bank and Gaza, on the one hand, and the PLO in Lebanon, Syria, and Tunis, on the other. None of these things made any sense to me. I grew up as a very Americanized child in many ways, with my mother.
Then when I was 17 or 18, I discovered that my father had been previously married in the US; that he had gone to Princeton and Georgetown—and more and more things came to light.
I remember it was during a meeting with Samia Halaby, the Palestinian artist in NY, that I told her about my father, and that I was basing part of my female character on my father’s return from the States to the Levant. And it was Samia Halaby who encouraged me, a lot, with her piercing, intense, eyes. She said, “You MUST make this film. You HAVE to capture the thoughts of these people. We are losing this entire generation very quickly. You have to go back and do something about your Dad’s history.”
I returned to the Middle East in 2006. War broke out in Lebanon where I was living, and without thinking, I just started filming my father. Renting small cameras. I did not know what I was going wind up with, or what archive we had. I just filmed my father. I thought, let me get this man’s story on tape—if anything, for my children or my sister’s children or for posterity. I wasn’t sure what sort of documentary it would be.
Then Adam Shapiro got involved, and he helped me with the political archive. I thought then that it would be a political story of my father’s opposition to Arafat, because he worked with the PLO. The revolution against Arafat and the failure of the PLO and all the ensuing stuff. I always knew my father was a fascinating person in general, just by comparing our lunch- and dinner-table conversations with those of other families I knew. My father would trace the history of Aramaic language over lunch. He could not do any small talk. None. All our lunches were about nuclear power, Saudi Arabia, the etymology of words in Persian and Turkish and Greek, and so on. He spoke multiple—about 8—languages at Princeton, so he was quite learned—about the history of language and words, for example. And he was obsessed with animals and topography and geography and history. He liked how food was kept, how villagers ate, how food was seasonal—everything you talked to my father about—medicine, anything—he knew a lot. But he was an extremely fascinating human being, and he loved to tell stories.
So I began filming. The more I delved, the bigger the story got. I discovered I could interview people in Lebanon, Dubai, and Jordan. I looked through all our photos and I discovered my father had an arsenal of old photos of Palestine. All the old photos of Palestine you see in the film were taken by my father. He was a very avid photographer when he was a tour guide in the Galilee. I discovered we had a lot of 8-mm film from the 1960s and 1970s. And I discovered we had Betamax and VHS video of all the protests, and the revolution stuff, and conferences and interviews—and it just grew. This is two or three years into the research.
Then I contacted every single person I knew that my father had known over the course of his life. People donated archives, and photos, and videos—and it snowballed. Then I thought I might as well put some poetry in there, some glitter, maybe some propaganda films, some archive from Vietnam—and I just went bananas looking for all sorts of things that could support my vision of the film, which had gone from being a regular political, simple documentary to being something a bit more creative, that looked a lot more like Hind, that behaved a lot more like a poem, and a thought, and a love letter rather than a straightforward documentary.
I realized we could send people to Sidon [in Lebanon], and they could film my old house. And then I sent my cousins in the Galilee [where Shoufani’s father’s home town of Ma’liya is located] to find a cameraman to film the Galilee. And I had no producer, so I spent my entire life organizing movement of tapes and footage through war zones, and checkpoints, uploads and downloads—just madness.
I located an old Emirati man who had 12 betamax machines. He allowed me to come into his home for 2 days, 12 hours a day, to digitize all my dad’s old Betamax footage from the 1980s in Syria. He was a fantastic old Emirati man who was very familiar with the Palestinian cause and very kind and allowed me to sit in his house, with his children, in his office and endlessly digitize hour after hour of tapes from the PLO.
Then I found an editor… then I got a little grant from AFAC, because I had been spending all my money working on it. A lot of people worked on this film for free. It is really a labor of love. Many people helped because they loved my father. I think I managed to galvanize a lot of support for my father’s cause and personality. And I had a fantastic editor, Ayman Nahle—he was so integral and such a big part of the film. It is his vision alongside mine. He really put a lot into the film.
Without realizing it, because my father was now stuck in Syria due to the war, I began updating people on Facebook about my father in Syria. As well as updates on the history of the PLO and things he would say during the interviews. I would type up parts of phone conversations I had with him. He was in Damascus and would not let me see him. Basically I galvanized an audience, a base of many people all over the world who for some reason were very moved by his story, because it is a very tragic story and he is a charismatic character.
As a child, you don’t realize these things about your father. You just think of your father as your father—half the time, just an annoying man who won’t let you blast your music or whatever. But the more I saw people’s reactions, the more I realized that I had a good dramatic character in my own family. And he has an extremely traditional dramatic story. Here is a man who set off to accomplish a noble goal, had a bunch of obstacles I his way, had a bunch of personality flaws that led to his downfall. In the meantime, he lost his wife, his family, his children, and then his homeland, and yet he persevered. It has all the elements of a tragic odyssey. I think so, at least.
BPFF: And through that you can tell many aspects of Palestine’s story, and the Palestinian history.
HS: This is my biggest concern with the film. I had to choose very carefully between telling a personal story or a political story. And to avoid veering off into any one of the two directions too much. I have enough footage to make a five-hour film, or several films. In fact, I am thinking of donating the material from the interviews to political researchers who could do something with the material and subtitle it and put it up on line, just to have information on Zionism, and Palestine, the Black Panthers, and Edward Said and countless stories that my father has about Arafat, and people, his opinions on the PLO. I have about 10 hours of tapes sitting there that I could not use in my film.
So it was a very delicate balance of trying to talk about politics a little bit, but also just really tell a personal family story without also glorifying the character but also to mention his many flaws and try to make him a well-rounded human being. Towards the end of the film, I veered more towards the personal. I think that it is a political film for people who don’t really know the story of the country. For them, it would be very informative. But I think if you are extremely familiar with the history of Palestine, you might not find much new in this story politically. You might be interested in the critique of Arafat. But it certainly is not an in-depth analysis of the PLO. It is a poetic memoir of my father from the points of view of myself, himself, and my family.
That distinction has to be very clear: I made a poem and a love story for my family. I did not set out to make a political film about Palestine. Nor am I really equipped to do that—to delve deeply into Palestinian history. There are people far more qualified to take that on. But I did want to show the degree to which my father was angry with what the leadership had done. This is something I definitely wanted to convey—I wanted his anger to be apparent, and to denounce—you know, to say this was not my final decision. I did not bring our people to this brink.
And then the Syrian war broke out, so there was that element in the film, which was never meant to be there.
BPFF: Before we get to the Syrian war, can elaborate on the anger your father had and the thing that enraged him the most—about why the leadership had made such a terrible mistake.
HS: My father was always engaged with the civil society in Israel. When he was in the US, he was always engaged with the people, trying to create a secular civil society that could exist in a one-state solution. He knew the larger game plan of the Israelis. He knew they were going to become more and more radical and more and more Jewish, and that there was no way we could fight this war based on our religious perspectives. He knew what settler colonialism was and what a garrison-state was. He coined some of these terms. He was the person who wrote the theory of the settler-garrison state back in the 1970s. No one really listened. I mean, some people did, but to a large extent but the leadership of Fatah just wanted to create a presidency in their own country. He was extremely opposed to that. He would have preferred to stay as a refugee outside, he would have preferred to not have a country, if it meant that we would get only 15% of our land and really stay under occupation. The deal that Arafat did… and right now, look, [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas just dissolved Oslo. So we’ve gone nowhere!!
It is unfortunate that people fought my father so much back in the 1980s, and now they are like, wow, he was right! He knew these people very intimately, the people in the leadership, and he was very respectful of a few of them, he loved them deeply, but with the Fatah leadership, I think he saw they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. They were just incapable of negotiating with the enemy, because they did not actually understand the enemy. They did not speak Hebrew, they didn’t study it, and they could not see further than their own limited desire.
And, what was even more difficult for my father, I think he saw widespread corruption. Which we understand today is something that people just accept. These people [the leadership] are multimillionaires and everyone else is living in a hovel or in middle-class credit card debt or poverty. While these so-called leaders who were not elected run around in their suits. I think he was extremely derisive, extremely opposed to people who stole money from people. He was a true socialist in that sense. There is nothing worse in my father’s eyes than betraying a just cause by stealing money to buy yourself a house and a car. There is nothing worse. He despised these people. He kept his hands clean and made a lot of enemies, because he would not budge from his position.
He was a difficult man. He was very principled and extremely complicated. He eventually realized that he was surrounded by a large number of people in Syria and an equal number of people inside Ramallah who were all moving in one direction that he could not support, and that he could not see yielding any results for the Palestinian people. And I think that time has proved him right, unfortunately.
On the one hand, I feel good that my father had the prescience to say these things—that we have to have one state, we have to get rid of the military occupation and we have to engage with the people on the ground; that we cannot kick out the Israelis, and we must live with them in one secular state for everyone. But then again, my father was a pan-Arab nationalist in many ways. I think he saw the liberation of the Palestinian people to be inextricably linked to the freedom of the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Jordanians, etc. There was no difference, to him. They were one people linked together in one cause. If we were dealing with political dictators, imperialism or colonialism, if our resources were being robbed, if foreign powers were installing dictators in our midst and bringing in leaders to divide and conquer, then we were all facing the same enemy.
And I think his problem with the Palestinian leadership is that they took the Palestinian revolution and resistance from being a pan-Arab cause that was supported by the whole Arab world and instead they made it regional, then national, then just local, coming out of Ramallah. My father always thought, really? The central cause of the Arab world, the hugest problem we have, will be handled only by some guy in Ramallah? No! To him, Palestine was the responsibility of all the Arabs.
BPFF: And that was the perspective of that era.
He was so vehemently opposed to all this that I think he just sunk into a depression. Not all of this is in the film. He was definitely a depressed man in the early 1990s. My mother and father had a very difficult time around Oslo.
BPFF: You really should take all the materials you have gathered and give it to an archive or an institute or a museum. They are so valuable. The fact that you digitized them is amazing. They need a home.
I definitely believe that, aside from the stuff that is personal to our family, I think that the archive that I have that I recovered from my father should go to a public resource. My father would have wanted the stuff to be available to the people.
BPFF: So much has been erased or carried off by the Israelis or lost or destroyed that anything that remains is invaluable.
They took away boxes of my father’s photos in Sidon. In 1982, when the Israelis invaded Sidon, the first house they went into was my father’s house. They stole and they destroyed and they took all my father’s photos. Thank god the neighbors managed to salvage a little bit. But we lost a lot of photography. They took other stuff and his library. He has lost so many homes. It is so sad. But there is a dark, aching, burning anger in the middle of my ribcage, because I really want the photos he took. He worked for years as a tour guide and had fantastic slides from all over Palestine. And also of our family and of Lebanon in the early 1970s. He was a good photographer and he had classic cameras. And in 1982, they demolished so much of our home and stole so much and took so much.
But he managed to save what he could, and for 30 for 40 years, they were sitting in boxes. I found them and they are OK, because Syria is not a humid country. It is fantastic how photography just lasts and lasts. Not to mention that I have at least a thousand books in Syria. All packed up somewhere and I don’t know how to get all my family books out of Syria. That will be my next odyssey.
BPFF: How did the film transform your personal relationship with your father?
It instilled more awe and wonder in the things he knew. It helped me to deal with his absence. It introduced me to the story of my grandfather, and why my father did the things he did. And stories of his own grandfather, which are fascinating but did not get into the film.
I also realized that my father was more emotional than he had ever let on before. He cried a lot during the film. He enjoyed telling me the stories. And I think he was happy and somewhat impressed with the kind of questions I asked. I think he went from thinking of me as a funky, silly, artsy girl to seeing that OK, this girl can ask tough questions and has done her research and talked to people. And it brought us closer—we had a joint project.
I really wish I had filmed a lot more. I only had seven days of footage with him over the four years. It’s nothing. But no one expected the Syrian war to break out, so I did what I could.
It brought us closer and helped me understand clearly why my father did the things he did, which had always been a mystery. I got to tell my father things that I hadn’t told him for three decades. I think he was extremely happy that his daughter was making a film about him. And when I was collecting all the material in the house, I realized that he had been collecting all this stuff for me. He told me many times, “when you went off to become a filmmaker and a writer, I thought one day, this stuff would be useful to you as a filmmaker and a writer.” It was very moving to me. There was stuff sitting there for 25 years until I took it.
So it was interesting to see how in the beginning of filming, he would only wear a suit and shirt and tidy up, and he wanted to be known as this very serious historian/ academic/ political leader. Towards the end, he would walk around in his pajamas and became more relaxed. Slowly, slowly, he became more comfortable with letting me show his real self. But I don’t think he could have conceived of this film in its current form. I think he thought it would be a traditional documentary with talking heads.
Because he was in Syria without an internet connection, he could not see any of the film.
BPFF: What are you working on next?
I am making another art house documentary that I am hoping will be an extremely sensitive look at politics, gender and sexuality in the lives of seven contemporary Arab women poets. I am a writer myself and a performer. I have six other friends, all Palestinian or Lebanese, who are all fantastic women. I feel it is imperative that we start making films about women who are progressive and in control of their own destinies; who are talented poets and performers, and who are changing the cultural scene of Dubai and beyond. So the film will be about religion, film and sexuality—love, not just sexuality—in the lives of these seven women.
BPFF: Do you have any final thoughts to add?
I am very grateful that this film was accepted by the Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF). I think Boston has been brave to do that.
Trip Along Exodus screens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on Saturday, October 17 at 2:30 pm. Hind Shoufani will be attending and will converse with the audience following the film.