Drama Finds a Palestinian Filmmaker

By Nancy Ramsey, June 12, 2003 The New York Times

When Hany Abu-Assad was directing "Rana's Wedding," a film about a young Palestinian woman who resists her father's attempts to marry her off to a man of his choosing, a typical day began with a discussion among the crew members and their driver about where it was possible to film.

"Rana's Wedding," which will open the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at Lincoln Center tomorrow, is set in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, a city on the West Bank, and was shot there in late fall 2001, when Israeli-Palestinian violence was growing. For Palestinians, moving from place to place, when permitted, often meant passing through Israeli Army checkpoints. At times Mr. Abu-Assad and his crew had guns aimed at them while they were working.

The story line of "Rana's Wedding" is simple. Rana's father disapproves of the theater director she loves, so he plans to take her abroad at 4 p.m. on the day the movie takes place unless she agrees to marry a man from a list he has prepared. Rana has other ideas: she plans to find her lover and marry him that afternoon.

"The film is based on a true story," Mr. Abu-Assad said by telephone from Park City, Utah, where he was attending the Sundance Institute's Filmmakers Lab. "When I heard the story, I thought, `Wow, this would be great for a movie.' First, there's movement; Rana's searching for her lover, and she has to move from one place to another. Second, it's the story of a Palestinian girl from a conservative family who is becoming an adult. And last is the narrative of the place, about living under occupation."

The Human Rights Watch festival, which runs through June 26 at the Walter Reade Theater, will include films shot in Brazil, India, South Africa, Cuba and the Kurdish region of Iraq, covering subjects including AIDS, poverty and the aftermath of war and genocide. Mr. Abu-Assad will receive the Nestor Almendros Prize for courage and commitment in filmmaking, named after a founder of the festival, a Spanish cinematographer who died in 1992.

On Saturday the festival will present another film directed by Mr. Abu-Assad, "Ford Transit," which he shot last summer and which takes place largely in the van of Rajai, a driver he hired while working on "Rana's Wedding." (The title is the name of a European model of a Ford van.)

"The Ford Transit is a metaphor for the theater of the Palestinians, a people without a homeland," Mr. Abu-Assad said. Passengers - politicians, children, fellow filmmakers, a psychologist, day laborers - come and go. There are jokes and disagreements; there is a slow-motion interlude at a checkpoint with American gangsta rap on the soundtrack.

"When occupation becomes daily life, reality becomes like fiction," said Mr. Abu-Assad, 41. A Palestinian who was born in Nazareth, he lived and worked in Amsterdam for several years and now lives in Israel.

"I like to say that my work is 100 percent documentary and 100 percent fiction," he said. "People's lives change. In documentaries people will tell you what they think at that moment. Maybe later they will think differently. And the news deals with one side of a story in a sensational way; in a good feature film a problem is seen from all angles, which makes it much closer to reality.

"In `Ford Transit' some people were there naturally, some I invited into the car," he said. "I want the audience to ask themselves, `What is real and what is not real?' "

Addressing this blending of fact and fiction, Bruni Burres, the festival's director, said: "Hany is using this in a place where everybody's trying to say they have the truth about the land. Balance? I usually don't use that word. I know that every filmmaker comes with a point of view."

Mr. Abu-Assad's point of view is clear. In conversation he speaks of living not in Israel but in Palestine. "I will accept Israel as a legal state only when Israel accepts Palestinians as equals," he said. He said that he mistrusted the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and that he found hope in the next generation of Israeli and Palestinian leaders, not this one. He derided the Palestinian suicide bombers for a lack of intelligence.

But his primary focus is on his films. At Sundance he is working with actors, testing scenes from a film he is preparing about two friends in Gaza. Working conditions on that film will probably not be much easier than those on "Rana's Wedding" and "Ford Transit."

"Working on `Rana's Wedding' was a hell," he said. "A whole culture has grown up around these checkpoints. From East Jerusalem to Ramallah is about 10 kilometers. If there is no barrier, it can take 10 minutes. With the barriers, it can be two hours. So you have to find a way to avoid them."

Clever drivers, like clever filmmakers, take alternate routes. He said that Rajai, the driver for "Rana's Wedding" and the star of "Ford Transit," was - "how do you say it? -our Messiah?" He continued: "He delivered us. I'd say, `I want to be someplace at 1 o'clock,' and he'd say, `No problem.' " He laughed. "Can you imagine? Always it was, `No problem.' "

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