Alexis Monchovet and Stephane Marchetti directors of ’Abu Jamil Street’

There are a lot of films about Palestine and especially Gaza. Your documentary focuses on one very specific, widely unknown phenomenon in Gaza: the tunnel system under the border to Egypt. How did you come to make this film?

Alexis Monchovet: It was a fairly long process. We started to film in the Gaza strip in September 2005, for our first movie, Rafah, One Year in the Gaza Strip. We got to know the place and the people very welll; it is the smuggling place of Gaza. The last war in Gaza strip in 2009, which was a very hard war, was basically fighting the tunnel system. So for us it was an evidence to make a film about this crazy situation. We followed them and wanted to see what would happen, because we knew it would be impossible to undermine the tunnel activity.

What is happening in Rafah?

A.M.: Since 1982, Rafah city has been divided by a wall into Palestinian and Egyptian sides. Many families have relatives on the other side, which makes it easy to dig tunnels between houses and to do trafficking. Because many houses are right by the border, the tunnels can be only 700 metres [long], and around 7 to 10 metres deep, depending on what you want to bring. Big tunnels cost around 100 000 dollars, small ones around 50 000 dollars. In any case, a tunnel is an investment. Before the blockade, only a few guys used to dig the tunnels to bring weapons during times of the Intifada. It was very dangerous because Israel was really looking for the guys bringing weapons. After the blockade, people would transport cement, food, drink, everything. Hamas accepts that people dig their tunnels. All the guys living on the border have some cousins on the other side. And when the tunnels are destroyed, they just start again.

Stephane, you were editing the film in Paris with the footage Alexis sent you from Gaza, which amounted to 700 hours of material. How was it to be editing so far away from the action?

Stephane Marchetti: It’s very difficult to get permission to enter Gaza. Alexis is more of a journalist than me, and filming in a tunnel is better done by only one person. For a while, I was frustrated that I couldn’t be there, so I went to Gaza to get a picture of the situation and met some of the people in the film. But given our stylistic intentions and ideas, to make films that are as close to cinema as they can get, it was good for me to have a certain distance from the filming. Alexis was right there with the action, and it was good to have a counterbalance. I looked at all the interviews, found their strong moments, and could then say to Alexis, “We need a shot of this”. It was a huge amount of footage, and sometimes it was hard to choose and to prioritise. In any case, we wanted to emancipate ourselves from TV documentary.

The tunnel diggers showed a lot of humour, given their difficult situation. Was it your intention to make a humorous film?

S.M.: We wanted the film to be serious, because these ordinary people are living in extraordinary circumstances. But there, it’s also just everyday life. People laugh and pat each other on the back and bicker about little things. We hadn’t planned that in advance, the humour just came out naturally. It’s a way to deviate from the everyday horrors, a way of compensation.

In the film, one of the protagonists tells an allegory about Tom and Jerry. How would that story go with regards to Israel and the tunnels?

A.M.: The war between Israel and Gaza is not a joke – but the war between Israel and the tunnel diggers is. And for sure, the tunnel diggers will win. The big cat is looking for them but it will lose, because it’s so difficult to stop them. In 2004, Israel destroyed two streets of houses because they were too close to the border, and even after that the tunnels continued to exist. During the war in 2008, 2009, they destroyed all the tunnels, and now there are even more. This is the story of Tom and Jerry: it’s an F-16 looking for the tunnel diggers, but whatever happens, the tunnel diggers will continue to do what they do.

Interview and photo by Mara Klein

SEE A VIDEO OF THE INTERVIEW HERE