The Writer and the Flautist

A short documentary featuring Palestinian author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh in which the idyllic West Bank landscape is contrasted with the devastating Arab-Israeli ideological divide. 

Raja Shehadeh introduces Luke and John Tchalenko’s ‘The Writer and The Flautist’ (2010) (30 mins). Followed by Q&A session. [Total time: 1hr]

This year’s film programme focuses on four small nations emerging from conflict: Palestine, Kurdish Iraq, Libya and Sri Lanka. In celebrating these cultures, we aim to create a vibrant international platform for cultural exchange and small nation dialogue in Scotland. Each film will be followed by a discussion featuring filmmakers and writers as they take questions from the audience and try to illuminate both the film, and the plight of each nation.

A comment from Raja Shehadeh

The working title of this film, Divided Landscape, (which was  eventually retained in the subtitle)  structures the contents into three parts:

The first is  the re-enactment  at the location described in Chapter 6 of my book,  Palestinian walks, Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,  of the imagined encounter with the Israeli settler about which I will say more below.

The second, the landscape and its voice.

On this the Directors had this to say: “In the divided landscape, the Wall divides but a picture of the Wall does not necessarily spell division. The landscape had a voice before the Wall but what was it? For a long time we thought of using a pre-Islamic Qasida- epic poetry of the origins and foundation of the Arabic language- but that would have been too difficult to explain. During the shoot someone introduced us to Ashraf Affore and the sound of his Ney flute was so right for the film that the title became, The Writer and the Flautist, subtitled, In a Divided Landscape.

 And finally  the third, the Bedouin people for whom, as the Directors say, “the central issue- the illegal settlements there by the force of the gun, occupier and occupied face to face across barbed wire- was a daily occurrence of crude physical violence to real people like you or I. We did not realize it at the time that their intervention would make the film explicit. And we certainly did not know that Haj Salem, sadly deceased soon after the shoot, would give us the tribe’s recent history in the form of an ancient Qasida.”

Now to go back to the fist part, the re-enactment of the imagined encounter.

The location where this was filmed  is only  five miles down the hill from where I live in Ramallah. Near the village of A’yn Qenya  in Wadi Dalb  (in Hebrew Wadi Dolev) atop the hill is the Jewish settlement of Dolev from where comes the settler whose words are spoken in the scene. For many years it was the only Jewish settlement in the area. But over the past decade it has come to be one of twelve. This is because the settlers were worried that, situated as they are on the wrong side of the wall which Israel is building mostly in Palestinian territory, they might be forced to evacuate. This motivated them to work hard to establish more settlements (strength in numbers) over private Palestinian land to complete the circulation of Ramallah and eventually connect their settlements with those encircling Jerusalem.

Just before the film was shot there was a new fledgling army post that was being turned  into a settlement only  two miles away from my house. This had prevented us from walking in the hills or driving down to A’yn Qenya. But then the government decided to consolidate the settlements and did the unusual act of evicting the few settlers living there.

But with its removal the army post that had been stationed there was moved to a  new and observation post just below the hill where the settlement of Dolev sits. This meant that as we filmed in the wadi below we were being observed by the Israeli soldiers. I had no doubt that it was a matter of time before they would descend and try to stop us from carrying on with filming. With us was my friend the photographer, Bassam Almohr. He was playing  the part of the settler. I stood before him and did my best to hate him by attempting to think of  all the nasty things the occupation has brought upon us. Once we finished shooting this part, Bassam had to leave to return to work. After he left I was being filmed enjoying  the flowers in the valley. I looked up and saw the line of gun-toting soldiers just above me. I decided to disregard them and continue examining the flowers. Our fixer  could speak Hebrew. In answer to  the soldier’s  question about who we were and what we were doing he said that he believes we were from the National Geographic Magazine interested in the flowers of the area.

This satisfied the soldiers and they began to take pictures of the flowers which had alluded them earlier as they concentrated all their efforts at searching for “terrorist” Arabs.

When  they left, I relaxed. Yet  the need  to explain my presence in my own hills with a lie left a bitter taste in my mouth. Still, at least they didn’t confiscate the film of which you can see here a short clip.

by Raja Shehadeh