"Simone Bitton  Michel Khleifi Brussels, 7 June 2005" "Let's light a cigarette first." "You knowme well." "A cigarette at the bottom of a wall." "At the bottom of The Wall." "Good, at the foot of The Wall." "Howlon has it been?" "A year, a year and a half?" "The film was shown for the first time exactly one year ago." "But I made the film two years ago." "That's a long time ago, but at the same time..." "If I made it right now, it'd be even more serious." "How so?" "Because the situation in the region has deteriorated." "I'd make it the same way, I think." "I wouldn't change anything, but it would be even harder because the situation is deteriorating every day." "People are more aware of it now." "Because I acted very quickly." "I filmed the beginning of the building of the wall." "Some people, even some friends of mine, thought I was a bit crazy." "Not everyone realised yet how serious the situation really was." "A film about that, they asked." "But I felt it wasn't simply one of many episodes, that it was..." "But why do you call it serious?" "More people are suffering terribly under it." "You know, I'm very..." "It's more serious when 50,000 people are being hurt than 10,000 people." "I'm just talking about quantities then." "The longer the project goes on, the more suffering there is." "That suffering is widespread and it is truly outrageous." "Yes, but you belong to different societies and you are lucky to live in harmony with those societies." "You see?" "You are lucky." "There's one thing I really don't understand, that is, how did they come to building the wall?" "Beside the explanations in the film." "What do you think is the reason?" "What I think?" "The Israelis decided to." "The wall was an Israeli decision, an Israeli disease." "It was built under Israeli pressure." "They didn't decide to build a wall, the Israelis did." "I think it's very obvious that it's a serious symptom of an Israeli disease." "The Palestinians don't play an active role." "They endure it." "Precisely." "That's why I think..." "There are Palestinians in my film, but this is much more a film about the Israelis." "In this case, the Palestinians are the passive party." "Some people have reproached me with that, by the way." "But they have the right to." "How so?" "I don't understand." "Some people said:" "You should knowbetter." "People want, especially in our region, because a lot of films are being made there..." "They want to watch the same film." "And it has to be about everything." "I don't knowif you feel that, too." "I'm talking about some people." "There are always people like that." "Whatever you showthem, they want to see something else." "Yes, but it's not important what one or the other says." "The important thing is the message." "Even an abstract image spreads a certain message." "If we expose ourselves..." "You exposed yourself by means of this film." "And it is to your credit." "That's not the problem." "But how can we, from our point of view..." "I have the impression that what we are doing, creates the possibility of doing what the film doesn't do, that is, explain the complicated process that led to the film." "For instance, you didn't simply pick up a camera one day to start filming." "There's a whole process leading up to it." "And I think the viewer..." "I was roused to action on the day that I heard through the media, that such a project existed, the day that it was announced." "The Israeli Minister of Defence said he was going to build a wall." "I must have gone through this process that made me realise I wanted to make a film about it." "It was a subject for me." "Why?" "What are the reasons?" "When you look back at that moment in the past, what went through you?" "I don't know." "You're always the last to knowwhat you're experiencing." "But there are undoubtedly two aspects." "The first aspect is that my work is about the Middle East and that it has an influence on me." "I've made several films." "And I realise that, although I'm not doing this consciously, when I make a film in the Middle East, in Israel and Palestine," "I always try to grasp the essence of the period." "And I felt..." "Thanks to my profound knowledge of the region" "I immediately understood that it was very important and that it would mark our lives." "That the wall would mark our lives in the following period." "On the other hand, there was also the fact that I felt torn apart at that moment." "The idea alone that there would be a wall between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and Arabs." "A wall that would divide not only the land, but also the people." "And at such a vulgar way at that." "When I heard that, I felt as if I was torn apart." "I think I feel the urge, a pathological urge, to identify myselfwith that country," "because it is both Jewish and Arab and so am I." "That's the way it is." "If that is divided, I am divided." "Because where should I go?" "It's selfish, because that means nothing compared to all the suffering." "Their land is taken, they're locked up and they can't live anymore, but that aspect also plays a role for me." "I've used it to make a film, not about me, but about them." "I've used that inner feeling to tell a better story about them." "When you say you've got that feeling, it's also a mirror of the walls that have risen inside us." "But fortunately, some people try to live their lives across all walls and borders and barbed wire." "I have the impression that the problem at the moment is that people are so blinded by what's happening that everything becomes normal." "According to the Israelis everything is justified, I'd say." "That's why I wanted to make this film as quickly as possible." "I knowwe get used to everything, even the most dreadful things." "I knewwe had to move quickly, before people became used to this horror." "I was hoping I could still tap into some feelings of surprise, shock, defiance and rebellion." "And I think I did and it was quite a relief." "I tried to find the human side of people, concerning the wall." "I didn't go looking for their violent side, their feelings of revenge or humiliation." "No, I went looking for their human side, which was shocked by that thing, because it's too big, too obscene." "But I had to move quickly, because unfortunately, you get used to it." "Yes, but have you gone back to Israel since then?" "Have you had talked about the film?" "Yes, but you know..." "The feeling about the wall is shifting." "That's obvious and it gives you some hope." "It's true that, two years ago, the whole of Israel agreed on building the wall." "Not so anymore." "When you ask people in the streets of Tel Aviv, which I didn't want to do, most of them will still tell you:" "The wall was a good idea." "We're safe now." "Most of them, but not all of them." "It's become clear that the fight against the wall has become a priority." "It's at the top of the list of all human rights organisations and so on." "And a great number of important people now see the hypocrisy and the awful consequences." "But it's like I say so often:" "If we'd had the power, they would have known." "I'm one of many people who discovered Palestine through your first films." "When I was twenty, I came to Paris." "And the first time I sawPalestine, was thanks to your wanderings in The Fertile Memory or so." "It was thanks to your films." "That may be trivial, but this isn't:" "the fact that I came from there." "And that's a very strong feeling, you can't imagine." "It's really unbelievable." "I am, as you say, a product of my Israeli education." "Not entirely." "I arrived when I was eleven and I'd been raised differently." "And I came from an Arab country, from Morocco." "Until I was twenty, everything was Jewish." "Primary and secondary education, the rambles, the army." "I was a product of that." "I didn't hit on you as a soldier." "I came from that region and I had to watch a film to see the country that I had never seen." "Because when you growup in Israel, you don't see the Palestinians." "You only see Jewish things." "It sounds unbelievable, but you knowit's true." "I believe you." "I just want to help." "At the end of the seventies..." "You arrived in Israel in..." "In 1966." "In 1966." "In my case, I was fourteen or fifteen, and wasn't allowed to leave Nazareth without permission." "So I grewup in a period in which I only had the chance to leave a fewtimes." "It's not just about geography." "I'm saying this to help you." "Before I discovered the travel routes, inside the country, our country," "I had spent almost eight years abroad." "I came back to make my first coverage for Belgian television and rediscovered my own country." "It wasn't allowed before." "I was forced to meditate on a tree or a rock and to admire the mountains, because I couldn't go anywhere." "And at such a moment you start calling it to mind." "I only got freedom of movement when I slowly turned Belgian." "You see?" "When you first made films, did you realise that you showed a country that people hadn't seen or hadn't wanted to see before, a hidden country?" "No, I would say..." "Because it was very intense." "For me and many others." "Yes, but you know..." "You gave us a picture of what was just a name, Palestine." "At last we could picture it." "Thanks to you." "After all those years I don't want to start..." "But the process was much more innocent." "You know, I find the art of filming so beautiful because it's an art form in which you can still unveil things." "The vision, the look and the perspective help us reveal things." "You can call it a poetic art form." "Just like a poet you see the same window, the same room every morning." "And every time you discover something new and spiritual." "I've done nothing more than filmed what I loved, what made a deep impression on me." "I remember that in those days" "I only wanted to film what I loved." "And not the things that I didn't love." "They were simple things." "That's the beauty of films, yours included." "You went looking for simplicity and let life evolve, in all its glory, but with all its terrors, too." "When you sketch our country's history in broad outlines, that's were our people was formed." "Our tribes united there, we received our laws." "We founded a kingdom, just like all other peoples in ancient times." "And then we left and the earth has been waiting for us, sleeping, for 2,000 years." "But in history books those 2,000 years pass in a second." "As if nothing happened, as if this land truly slept for 2,000 years." "Then we came knocking and woke it up." "Unbelievable, isn't it?" "Such a strange way of telling a country's history." "In debates I sometimes call it a sabbath of 2,000 years." "Nowthat the sabbath of 2,000 years is over, the Palestinians have to leave." "No, but that's..." "That's the conclusion that some people can draw, but surely not everyone." "It's clear." "But the problem's always the same, people don't see." "Yes, but..." "You can live there without seeing it." "I think that the humanity that we all have inside, brings us to looking at time in human terms." "You have one or two generations, for instance, the life of someone who is young, who is middle-aged and who grows old." "The avoidable age, right?" "At a given moment you reach it, but in my opinion the human harmony makes that 80-year-olds are wise and beautiful, because they accept the natural evolution, you see?" "That's all, that's hownature works." "I've got the impression that our ideologies force us to leave that humanity behind." "It's... as if the realisation of the natural course of events doesn't exist anymore." "I knowwhat you mean, the thinking is..." "It's so limiting that you lose contact with reality." "Precisely." "And what I liked about your film, was precisely that it showed reality, poetically speaking, because it's no direct speech." "As soon as you start filming..." "Getting rid of, as you call it, our humanity, all of a sudden." "There is a system that's stronger than us, so we have to turn it off." "That's my aim and the camera is ideal." "You use it without realising howlucky you really are, because it exposes you to reality." "Like all film makers," "I am influenced by ideologisms." "Right." "But it's important that you free yourself from them at the moment you are confronted with reality." "That's hard." "The simpler it looks, the harder it is, but that's the essence of our work, you can say." "We try to make everything as human as possible." "You have to get rid of all the factors that can influence the human vision you have of reality." "Of course, you are subjective, you have a vision that flows from a lot of things." "But you have to dispose of that ideological nonsense, all things that have been added afterwards." "When you film someone, you have to realise that it's a person." "You have to trust them." "In my film, for instance, there's a bad guy." "There's one." "In good films there are good guys and bad guys." "In my film there's only one bad guy." "But he was like that." "I gave him the same opportunities as others." "Do you understand?" "He comes across as a bad guy, my general, but he could seize his opportunity." "To come back to the art of filming." "What I find so impressive concerning our history, is that we created an ocean of possibilities, in our films, which goes against the reality of the impossible." "I think that precisely in our films..." "That something happens." "We offer resistance against it, the trees, the matters and the people have the right proportions." "And according to me there's a process that forbids us..." "I don't knowif you agree, but an almost chemical process that arises between individuals, between people, forbids us..." "But there are no..." "There are no fascist films, or hardly any anymore." "We've driven them away." "That's very important." "I feel that very strongly and we're terribly lucky." "And we're lucky we can experience this." "Because imagine a world without films, fiction or documentaries," "Israeli or Palestinian or the other way round, what picture would people have of us then?" "Our films really protect us against the stupidity and hypocrisy, against the media and the political world." "If it weren't for our films, we'd come across as monsters." "Really?" "Yes." "If you only see the Israelis and Palestinians the way they're portrayed..." "Not by us, film makers." "Without our films we'd come across as monsters." "If we weren't there, they'd be monsters." "We showthe Israelis and Palestinians as human beings." "The literature on it is disappearing slowly." "It's had its moments, but now you really have to go looking for it, like a needle in a haystack." "You have to look for sincere and human literature." "Don't you think..." "You see these films every day." "Small and big productions, by Israelis and Palestinians, working together, like you and Eyal, or working separately, it doesn't really matter." "But for one thing, you can only see each other in films anymore." "Nowthat the wall is there." "But I think that films are an art form from the big cities." "And big cities, you can't deny this, they are multicultural and multi-ethnic." "They are melting pots of different cultures." "Film making can only survive on places that are moving." "It's my impression that it's one of the last places where we can move freely." "We can bring Belgians, French, Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians into one project." "That's why I love films and why I will do anything for films." "They offer us a place to meet each other." "There we are..." "Yes, it's a physical meeting." "...not alone." "Making a film is something very physical." "I mean..." "An Israeli writer, let's say, can be very humanist and of good will, but he's imagining a Palestinian character in his room in Tel Aviv." "If there's a character like that in my film, I go to him, touch him and put a microphone on him." "He's got a body." "That changes everything." "It really changes everything and I think the viewers feel that, too." "You feel that there was a physical contact while making that picture, which is virtual." "But there had to be physical contact to make that picture." "That's the contradiction with the nationalist attitude towards films." "Our films are presented by officials as national films." "They are naive and want to portray our films as national films." "But in reality, they are international by the nature of the art of filming." "That's what I like about films." "We can only look forward to a better future in our region." "We present that better future, the future of openness that we've already experienced." "Your grandparents, just like mine, lived in a multicultural place, in spite of all the problems." "So, films are a new country." "That's what they are heralding." "A country of us all." "Just like the bird that heralds the spring." "Which one is it?" "I don't know." "All birds herald the spring." "I knowthe Arab name, but I've forgotten the translation." "I think it's the sparrow, that little bird." "That's it, the swallow." "The swallowheralds the spring." "We're swallows that are heralding something beautiful." "We must keep believing that."