Qalandia (working title) is a documentary film all about a checkpoint.
I spent hours, days, weeks - and returned again after years - hanging
around this checkpoint filming it. To me what was interesting was not
the Israeli soldiers mistreating every person walking by, or that the
checkpoint serves as a daily reminder of the occupation, control, humiliation
and inequality between Israelis and Palestinians, or that journalists
from all over the world could be found there on any given day - but
that the checkpoint became a social and economic center for Palestinians
lucky enough to be able to travel.
Merchants everywhere, selling everything from coffee to live chicks,
from mountain cheese to phone cards,
from cigarettes to socks. You can hear their chant-like screams every
time you walk through the checkpoint. Add to that the cacophony of the
cab drivers yelling out names of villages and cities, combined with
the everyday occurrence of kids with stones versus soldiers with guns,
and impotent human rights watchers standing by.
Qalandia is more than a checkpoint, more than a symbol of Israeli occupation
and Palestinian destitution and attempt to overcome difficulties, it
shows how even the most surreal thing becomes normalized into daily
life, how what started out as a checkpoint is becoming a definitive
- although contested - border between Israel and the Palestinians.
When I returned again to Qalandia after two years away, my fears of it becoming a border were becoming realized. The landscape around it had changed by the machinery of the Israeli Defense Forces, but many of the same merchants and cab drivers were still there. Now that it was apparent that Qalandia was on its way to becoming "Erez Number 2" (the famous sole entry point into Gaza), the joke was that the merchants would soon become duty-free sellers.
I expect that when I return next to Qalandia, the landscape would have further changed - stronger, more permanent barricades, the wall snaking all around it; perhaps it will be an official border of sorts. But I know the cab drivers and merchants will still be there, many likely the same I met the first time years ago... The plan is to go back a third time and film: on one hand show the checkpoint's permanence and fortification, and on the other hand show how the checkpoint itself becomes a part of the reality around it and takes on a new form and how its role in daily life is re-interpreted.
Filmed at
the Qalandia Checkpoint, halfway between Ramallah and Jerusalem in the
West Bank
in 2003 and 2005. Further filming planned for 2008.
Currently in production and post-production. Release Date TBD.
