Honoring Palestinian history: filmmaker Annemarie Jacir on "When I Saw You" yönetmen Annemarie Jacir: Filistin tarihi onurlandıran

Honoring Palestinian history: filmmaker Annemarie Jacir on "When I Saw You"

When I Saw You, the second feature film by leading Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir (Salt of this Sea), centers on an 11-year-old boy who has been exiled to Jordan along with his mother in the wake of the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rejecting the situation, young Tarek sets off from the refugee camp back to Palestine on his own, but is picked up and taken in by a group of fedayeen — the young, idealist fighters who were ready to sacrifice their lives to liberate Palestine in the ’60s and ’70s.

When I Saw You was screened during the sold-out opening night of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival earlier this month, where Jacir was present. I sat down with the director, who told me that she made a hopeful film despite her deep depression, how she put her actors through military training, and described the lenghty search to find the young star of her film. The following transcript was edited for length.

Maureen Clare Murphy: Let’s start with the particular moment in history in which your film is set, in the wake of the second mass expulsion of Palestinians, when the Palestinian armed liberation movement was on the ascendance. What compelled you to tell a story about this very particular moment in Palestinian history?

Annemarie Jacir: I wanted to do something about this period that is so key to our history, but I haven’t seen a lot of fiction work about — all the hopefulness that surrounded that period, when Palestinians felt they had more agency in their own lives, that they could do something. The feda’i [fedayeen], they were people who were volunteering, they were people who thought this was a possibility. Though it was after the Naksa [the 1967 occupation and expulsion] and the trauma of that, there was still this feeling of hope.

Tarek is not politicized — he just wants to get back home. In the refugee camp, they’ve recorded their names, they’re waiting, they believe something eventually will work out and those people will go home. Of course we know today [the refugees are] still in the camps. But Tarek moves beyond that. He won’t wait, it doesn’t make sense to him. So he rejects it, and refuses to be a refugee. And at some point the story is about him moving beyond the feda’i, too. It’s a romantic vision of the group and it’s from Tarek’s point of view, but at the same time we get a sense of the tension, this inner conflict and contradiction developing … we know later some of those groups will go more left, some will go more right, things will change. Tarek doesn’t get caught up in any of that … he stays clear on his goal.

For me, it’s maybe a question I have for that generation: what happened? Why didn’t they stay like Tarek?

MCM: I’m struck by how your film, similar to Elia Suleiman’s The Time that Remains, pays homage to a previous generation of Palestinians. So I wonder if this is a response to the current political stagnation, that you wanted to go back to a more innocent time in Palestinian history, or a more hopeful time?

AJ: I do want to pay homage to them [the feda’i]. The film refers to specific Palestinian films from that time period, photographs and even writings. And I didn’t want to shy away from being romantic about it, too. I have questions for them, but I also really respect what they were doing. They were young, idealistic people that dreamed of a better world. And they were not just Palestinians, they were from other parts of the Arab world, they were from Europe, they were from China, they were from all over the place — it was an international movement. And why not as Palestinian filmmakers be romantic about that? Some people say, how can you be romantic about these fighters? But why do they accept being romantic about Che Guevara? When it’s about him it’s ok, but when it’s about our guys, it’s not OK.