An air of anticipation built up in two different parts of the world at the same time, as the friends and colleagues of Palestinian filmmaker Abdel Salam Shehadeh, both in the Gaza Strip and in Tokyo, awaited the announcement of the final results of the Japanese film festival "Earth Vision".
When the phone rang in Gaza, or more specifically at Gaza's Ramattan News Agency, and the agency manager broke the news that he had just received from Tokyo, jubilation immediately replaced the anticipation.
After having passed three elimination steps in the festival, Shehadeh's 41-minute documentary film, entitled Rainbow, won the jury's first award. It was one of 17 films competing in the film festival, selected out of an original 1,200 applicants.
Reacting to the news, Shehadeh said that he considers his win an achievement for the Palestinian film industry and the Palestinian people as a whole. "I dedicate this film to the Palestinian people and to Palestine," he said over the phone.
Rainbow depicts the suffering of several Palestinians - including Shehadeh's own - following the May 2004 Israeli incursion into the southern Gaza town of Rafah, which was dubbed "Operation Rainbow" by the Israeli army.
"This film is not a documentary in the traditional sense - from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Rainbow is as much about Shehadeh coming to terms with his own [relationship] to this tragedy as it is about recording the destruction," said Jenny Gheith, a film critic for the Electronic Intifada.
Indeed, Shehadeh has said that the documentary reflected his nostalgia for his childhood days in Rafah, where he was born. There he meets his friend, abstractionist artist Ibrahim Al Mzayyen, who has also portrayed the painful reality in Rafah through his paintings, in which he mixed mud with red glue to create haunting images symbolic of suffering and senseless deaths.
"When people see a rainbow, they see bright colors against a sunny sky. They associate it with wishes and dreams, like the character of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz," Shehadeh explained. "Rainbow [the film] is the mixture of colors of destroyed homes, sabotaged streets and displaced people."
In the film Shehadeh also shared his family's history. Hailing from the village of Barbara, they fled to Rafah in 1948. Shehadeh's father, however, worked in Jaffa and only returned home every six months.
"When people lose their homes, their personal belongings are on public display. One man described how it is a violation of privacy and intimacy. They are piles of stories," Shehadeh explained.
Shehadeh says that the stories of the characters that he portrayed in the documentary, both living and dead, had haunted him for a lot of time, and that Rainbow was an attempt to answer the endless questions that had puzzled him.
"Ideas come out of my head, and ideas come into it. Stories and events run inside of me. Running and running, as if they want to reach something I don't know," he said. "I started feeling these images [as] a burden. Sometimes I want to get rid of this burden, and sometimes I want to keep it or mix these images together," he said.
The seasoned 45-year-old Palestinian director, who also heads the production department at Gaza's Ramattan News Agency, has made other documentaries, mostly revolving around the suffering of Palestinians during the second Palestinian intifada.
His films have received worldwide acclaim, as well as several awards at various international film festivals. Critics say that Shehadeh's films capture the true essence of the human self, and the attachment of Palestinians to their family, land and values.
"Shehadeh has stepped away from the routine coverage of dreadful events, which have shaped this part of the world for more than 50 years," said Gazan critic Sami Abu Salem. "He pulled himself away from filming the images of death, blood and lifeless bodies and pursued his own little dream behind the camera. It is a struggle with his own self."
"The film offers a rare glimpse of life after the cameras stop rolling in Rafah, of the processes of healing and hurting that continue on both sides of the lens and as such it is a profound and moving study of the role of the news reporter," Abu Salem added.
"Operation Rainbow" killed 45 Palestinians, 38 of them civilians including nine children. It also demolished 400 houses in its seven-day duration. Israeli forces claimed that the operation was to uncover tunnels used for smuggling weapons. They found one tunnel and damaged $8,000,000 in infrastructure.
Palestinian 'Rainbow' shines over Tokyo
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