Interview with Mohammed by AH ’22 and SN ’22.
Mohammed is a fifty-six-year-old Palestinian filmmaker. Born in a refugee camp in Jordan and having studied political science prior to filmmaking, Mohammed fervently believes in a philosophy that films should carry a message and a potential to impact the world—and thus he creates films to capture the oppression of human rights for Palestinians in the Middle East. His influences for pursuing meaningful filmmaking have included noteworthy individuals as Jack Shaheen and Oliver Stone. Some of Mohammed’s works have included The Iron Wall, a documentary showcasing the illegal construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as the wall surrounding the territory; and Broken: A Palestinian Journey Through International Law, a film tracking the 2004 case of the aforementioned wall in the International Court of Justice. Mohammed currently resides in Ramallah and in his spare time loves to play basketball, read, and—fittingly—watch new documentaries.
Transcript:
My name is Mohammed. I lived for about twenty years in America. I would describe myself as, “a human being, a film maker, who’s trying to do the right thing.” I see myself as an activist who uses film to highlight the violation of human rights. This is the best area for anyone who wants to defend their human rights, because I can’t think of any other region in the world where human rights are really abused more than the Middle East.
If you want to be a good documentary filmmaker, you have to read; you really have to read a lot. If I’m filming, I usually like to get up early and just sit and think about what I’m going to do. If I’m editing, I would like to see the piece that I’m going to edit and just sit back, drink coffee, smoke cigarette, think about it again, and filmmaking is really lots of thinking and lots of reflection.
We’re in Ramallah. It’s a bit primitive here, but it’s more close to my heart. The most difficult thing about living here is the unknown. It’s almost everything in your life is unknown. For example, here everything you want to do, even if you want to take your kids to the doctor, you think about the road to get there, is the doctor open, if there’s a curfew. Always, always questioning your basic freedom. Although I’m not free here, no one is free, but I feel like my mind is free, more than the U.S., more than any other place.
Probably my greatest lesson of life is how to be human, to be humble. To understand it intellectually is one thing. To practice it is another thing. Took me a long time to understand what that means. I’m very humble person. I pinch myself every day three times just to make sure that yes, I’m here, you know, and I’m thankful to many people for that. And I try to do the same thing and help other people. Every day, my house is like a youth club. All these young filmmakers, they come here and we work on things, and I give them advice, hope, anything.
I was born to a Palestinian family in Jordan. As you probably know most of the Palestinians in 1948, when the war started, become refugees in a neighboring country. So, my family was one of those families in Jordan.
Refugee camps, it’s a really miserable place. I grew up in one them. It’s very crowded. You don’t really have anything that people would need to grow or kids to play. But there’s one positive thing about refugee camps: it’s the community. They’re really like one family. And if something happened to any of them, everybody come in and pitch in and help. I would say the worst thing is the misery and the poverty and the best thing is the sense of community that exists among the people in the camp.
I know I don’t have the ability to change the world, or even change peoples’ mind. What I try to do in my work is to give the people a different angle to see an old story in a new angle. Hopefully I can create enough questions in their mind where they will go and research the story more on their own, and from there that’s where their own journeys start to try and discover something.
https://soundcloud.com/nancy-kalow/interview-with-mohammed-alatar
