[PEN-L:36300] Ticket to Jerusalem

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jabber (Ghassan Abbas) ekes out a living in the West Bank showing films to
fellow refugees. As befits a denizen of a community trying to survive under
conditions of poverty and blockade, he cannot seem to make it through the
day without facing some crisis or another. When he pleads with the senior
official of one camp for payment for his services, he only receives gas
money for his jalopy, which is constantly breaking down. His aging 16 mm
projector is also constantly in need of repair. The only thing that keeps
him going is the giggles of Palestinian children, who watch cartoons from
his eclectic library.

His wife Sana (Areen Omary) is part of an ambulance crew that is kept busy
by nonstop clashes between the Palestinians and Israeli occupation forces,
which are a ubiquitous and menacing presence throughout the film. Both
Jabber and Sana are forced to wait on long lines at checkpoints while IDF
sentries seem indifferent to his need to keep an appointment with an
audience or hers to attend to the sick or wounded. One of the most
remarkable things about this altogether remarkable film is the presence of
real Israeli soldiers who keep telling the actors that they "cannot pass
this way." One suspects that they were addressing the cast members of a
film rather than the characters they played, but it makes very little
difference in how power relationships are defined in the occupied territories.

Friends and relatives are constantly challenging Jabber: why does he waste
his time trying to entertain people who have neither jobs nor security. His
father-in-law urges him to move to Canada, where his son has a grocery
store that can use another hand. His friend Kamal, an auto mechanic who
repairs his jalopy and projector as a favor, urges him to join him as a
mechanic in his shop. One might surmise that Jabber is a surrogate for
Rashid Masharawi, the Palestinian director of the wrenching but inspiring
"Ticket to Jerusalem". When an entire people is struggling to survive, what
value does a feature film have? Can it put food on the table, employ them
or eliminate the degrading checkpoints and expulsions of an occupying power?

Masharawi was born in a Gaza refugee camp and founded a film production and
distribution center in Ramallah. Like Jabber, he had been an itinerant
projectionist, because there were virtually no movie theaters in
Palestinian areas.

In a profile on Palestinian filmmakers in the Toronto Star (Sept. 12,
2002), fellow director Elia Suleiman, whose "Divine Intervention" was
rejected as an Oscar contender because the Academy does not recognize
Palestine as a legitimate state, said, "There was a cinema in Ramallah but
the Israeli army shot it up and stole the equipment." It adds:

"In the Arab world in general, film-going is uncommon, perhaps because men
and women sitting together in the dark is seen as transgressive. There are
no films at the festival from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and
other Arab countries. But Suleiman estimates that there are at least 30
Palestinian filmmakers and videographers at work and the introduction of
new digital cameras means that making films will be easier in future."

If the sustained applause heard during the concluding credits of "Ticket to
Jerusalem", a film shown as part of the 2003 New Directors/New Films
festival, was any indication, Rashid Masharawi was not wasting his time. My
only hope is that this film can be released for commercial distribution in
the United States, where positive images of the Palestinian people are so
hard to come by.

After the film, as I sat eating sushi in a nearby restaurant, I overheard
racist comments directed against Arab peoples from people at the next
tables who otherwise seemed educated and cosmopolitan. I remarked to my
dinner companion that Arabs are perhaps the one ethnic group against whom
open displays of bigotry are accepted in polite company.

If "Ticket to Jerusalem" does open up in a theater in your city, make it a
point to see it. Not only is it a unique document of everyday Palestinian
life, it is superb cinema. In an obscenely wealthy country that has
steadily reduced filmmaking to one escapist formula or another, it is
ironic that we have to turn to desperate and impoverished Palestine for
true art.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org