Azza El-Hassan

A voice of Palestine.

At the end of 2000, Azza El-Hassan found herself stuck in her own house in Ramallah. The Israeli Army had laid siege to the Palestinian city where she lived. What could she do? She decided to record the situation, filming how her neighbours and children around were surviving. These images became the documentary This is Palestine (2001), which shows the effects of war over Palestinian lives. By showing the reality of this lesser-known side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, she became a kind of spokeswoman for her country.

According to Azza, she chose cinema as a living because she thought she had stories to tell. And she really did. Born in Jordan in 1971, because of the civil war taking place there she soon moved to Lebanon with her family. Years later, it was Lebanon’s turn to have a civil war. During this period, Azza was one of the youngest volunteers in the hospitals, at only eleven years old. Later the family went back to Amman, in Jordan. After finishing high school, she went to London to study filmmaking, despite the disapproval of her parents.

In 1996, she decided to settle in Palestine, where she started her career. Her films seem to recover the fragmented history of this almost invisible country. The documentary Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004) follows Azza’s search for films produced by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the late sixties and during the seventies. PLO used to document Palestinian realities and produce propaganda films. In 1982, when the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon, the PLO’s members had to abandon the country and the films disappeared with them.

Kings and Extras has a very personal touch, being Azza’s search for the stolen and destroyed memory of Palestine. It’s also very interesting to notice how the lost films, and filmmaking in general, is seen as something superficial there. As one of the interviewed women says: “It’s not time for cinema. If you want drama go to the checkpoint. Look at the men being tied up”. Azza El-Hassan, however, thinks that the most important thing for Palestine is to keep on producing culture. In her opinion, it’s a way to “reclaim humanity”. She also says: “my work and the work of others is very important for our sanity as people”.

And apparently she will keep people’s sanity in a very versatile way. Her next film will be a fiction called The Story of a Palestinian Gangster. It’s the story of a gangster who kidnaps a journalist in order to change his criminal image. The script was developed at the Binger Film Lab, in the Netherlands. It received an award at the Carthage Film Festival and at the Talent Highlight Market in Berlin. Now it’s in the TorinoFilmLab for the development and funding stage, the reason why Azza will be in Alba this week. For her, TorinoFilmLab is a “safe haven”, since it offers the possibility to support her work at every step of the project.

As for the future of Palestine, Azza sees it as “dim and gloomy”. On the other hand, she perceives the nature of her work very clearly, almost like a therapy: “I learnt that films do not create revolutions and do not change the world”, she concludes. “The fact that I am telling a Palestinian story, which is a personal story as far as I am concerned, firstly helps me to make sense out of a world that is illogical, unjust and irrational”.

Martha Lopes