10 FEATURES
uk
The human factor
The Israeli-Palestine conflict has been making headlines for sixty years. But how are the displaced
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affected? Filmmaker Ke Cai travelled to the Middle East to investigate. (Interview by Chris Watt)
hen Ke Cai visited the Middle East’s biggest
refugee camp last year, he was shocked by
the crushing poverty, the hopeless suffering,
and the suffocating density of life that he
encountered.
But rather than returning to his comfortable west end home to
forget about it as quickly as he could, the Glasgow Art School
graduate knew that he had to return as soon as possible – armed
with a camera and a mission to show Britain the plight of the
hundreds of thousands displaced by the conflict.
“I was first in Lebanon in summer 2006 covering the
Hezbollah-Israeli conflict,” says Ke. “I saw the bombs. There
are militants in the street, and everyone has guns. I realised that
there could be a good film there next time, so I went back there in
December, focussing on Palestinian camps in Lebanon.
“Someone asked my if I’d like to go to the Ain Helwe refugee
camp near Sidon, because they dropped a few bombs there. It’s
a totally different world – they have 100,000 people living there,
and I think it’s only two kilometres wide and three kilometres
deep. In one place 42 people were killed in one night.”
Though appalled by the scenes he witnessed, Ke was deter-
mined to return. “I realised how much worse life was in here than
everywhere outside, so I got permission to go back, with my own
translator, and realised that almost everybody here is without state.
They have no civil rights, they can’t build houses, they can’t find
employment outside – there’s 72% unemployment in the camp
– and a lot of Lebanese criminals hide in the camp, because the
Lebanese army has no authority there. I looked at Google Maps
after I got back, and it’s looks so dense – so dense you can’t even
see the streets. And outside you can see the normal Lebanese.”
Whilst the stories that make it from the Middle East to the
West usually focus on military details and political dealings, Ke
strives to ensure that his films and photography show the human
side of the conflict, and capture the local mood and the feelings of
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FEATURES 11
the people he meets.
He explains: “I don’t want to record any Hamas or Fatah offi-
cials because they talk rubbish. I want to focus on how individuals
get on with life – like if you see a man and know that he drinks
milk, and that he smokes cigarettes, and that he likes the colour
red, that humanises him and brings him closer to you. That’s the
reason I’ve done the short film A Conversation and a Speech.”
Ke’s latest film, an entry to Channel 4’s ‘Three Minute
Wonder’ series, jumps from scenes of a conversation between
an elderly Palestinian man and his eighty-year-old mother about
their lost homeland, and footage of a fiery speech delivered by a
militaristic politician.
Though official representatives of Palestinian groups are
frequently overtly militant, Ke doesn’t believe that this accurately
represents the views of the thousands of Palestinians torn from
their homes during six decades of struggle against the Israeli
occupiers. For a start, he points out, there are 19 distinct political
factions within the largest camp he visited – the most powerful
of which, Fatah PLO, controls little more than the main street
– and he believes that people’s desires are much simpler.
“I think Hamas and Fatah make empty
promises,” states Ke. “They talk about
fighting their way back to Jerusalem,
but all people want is to go back to
their country – the village they grew up
in and pat the tree they grew up with,
smell the air, feel the earth.
“But I don’t think it’s possible
at all to find a state, and resettle all
these people. The number is too
huge, and they have suffered so
many years. The only thing they
want is to go back to Palestine,
but it’s not going to happen. I
16th OCTOBER 2007
spoke to a lot of older people, who would tell me ‘Just give me
any nationality, any country, and I’ll go and live there rather than
here.’ But a lot of young people were different. One typical girl
told me ‘The Lebanese make our lives so difficult in the camp. I
don’t care about international aid, or whether the UN is helping us
or not, just send us home.”
Ke is quick to draw a distinction between the older Palestinian
exiles, who he believes have largely resigned themselves to their
unfortunate situation, and the younger, more idealistic and hopeful
generations. This, he suggests, is one of the factors that has led
to the widespread use of one of the worlds most tragic weapons
– the child soldier.
“The parents of children with guns think they know what
they’re doing, they think this is the future for their children, and
they want to teach them to fight now so they can kill just like
their parents. A lot of people think it’s very necessary
to do so.
“I wanted to do a montage sequence of this
Lebanese man I met telling his son about the
Attah festival, one month after Ramadan. It
celebrates the story of how Allah told Ibrahim
to take his son to the desert to sacrifice his son,
and he was going to do it, but when he had the
knife to his throat the god appeared and told
him just to kill a sheep instead. And now
every year at Attah families will kill
sheep in the street, and give the
meat to their families and friends
and the poor, and will tell their
children about Ibrahim.
“To me this is a very strong
metaphor and symbol for what is
happening to the children. Parents
give their children guns, and they
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think they are living for their future by sacrificing their children.
I think there’s something very deep and philosophical about this,
and that’s what I want to film when I go back.”
And Ke is adamant that he will return to Lebanon to produce
Timeline of the Palestinian struggle
a longer documentary, even if, as for his last project, the trip has Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire during WWI, the Palestinian area was mandated to
to be funded with months of scrimping and long shifts working in British control. There was increased Jewish migration to the area, and the native Palestinians openly
a fast-food franchise. rebelled against British control. In 1947 the UN partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab and
“I think the film I want to do would help the situation, and one Jewish, and in 1948 the state of Israel was established, occupying 77% of former Palestine. The
raise awareness. I’m trying to make it as un-politically charged
as possible, because I don’t thing people connect to that. You see
Israeli authorities pursued a policy of expelling resident Arabs, and 750,000 out of the estimated
so many TV programmes about conflict and people being killed, 900,000 Palestinians became refugees. 60 years later, there are around 350,000 Palestinian refugees in
and you see bodies in the street, but you don’t know the people. Lebanon alone.
What I want is to bring people back to the origin, so they where A series of conflicts between the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Israeli Defence Force and
the whole population comes from. I want to focus on one person, other neighbouring security forces have had repurcussions throughout the Middle East, and have
on one journey.
“There is a man I’m focussing on, Mohammed Dakwar, now
meant that the displaced Palestinians eking out a living in Lebanese camps have faced a constant day
in his seventies, who came to Lebanon when he was 11 years old to day struggle to find a secure and welcoming home.
– travelling in a cargo box. He managed to send his son abroad
because he thinks it is a better future for him, but he wants to stay
in Lebanon because it is close to his home. And from there he is
collecting things – coins, articles, clothes, literature, even a bomb
“I saw the bombs. There
are militants in the street,
and everyone has guns."
that Israel dropped on Palestine – he managed to get someone to
deliver that to him and he’s kept it.
“When I was interviewing him he told me he went back to
Palestine in the 1990s, when he was in his sixties [the Israelis only
allow older people to go back in case they fight] and he went back
for two weeks. He went back to his village, which has been razed
to ground zero, and he couldn’t find anyone there who knew the
place, or any houses; it’s just empty ground. He spent two weeks
searching, with his memories, fifty years after he left, and the last
day before he had to go back to Lebanon, he went down the road
and saw a tree and remembered he used to live near there. And
he found a big stone, managed to lift it up, and found the well he
used to drink from. He was crying. He told me the water was still
there, he could still drink from it. He was in his sixties then, and
he hadn’t been there for fifty years.
“And that’s what I want to show – the human side.”
All screenhots copyright Ke Cai. Clockwise from top left: Guns are a casual part of life in Palestinian refugee communities; local
schoolchildren show their curiosity towards the documentary lens; many parents encourage their children to get involved in the
To watch and rate Ke's film 'A Conversation and a Speech',
fighting; rooftop gunmen line the a parade route in southern Lebanon; the camera turns on Ke, visiting a Palestinian refugee family.
please log on to: www.channel4.com/fourdocs/