By Simon Coss
RENNES, Feb 12, 2009 (AFP) - Formal funding is practically non-existent, film-making is difficult, and there's only one decent cinema for almost four million people -- yet against all odds Palestinian filmmakers struggle on.
"Our films say we are here and we exist. Israel was built on the phrase 'a land without people for a people without a land.' But there was and there is a people," said Nadine Naous, a Paris-based Palestinian director.
Naous, a Lebanese national whose grandparents fled the 1948 war that followed the creation of the state of Israel, is typical of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers.
Visiting this western French city for a festival dedicated to films linked to the city of Jerusalem, her 2006 documentary "Everyone Has Their Own Palestine" was filmed in a refugee camp in Lebanon and looks at how young Palestinians feel about their future.
Due to her nationality, she said, she is banned from visiting Israel or the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Like Naous, Palestinian director Jackie Reem Salloum also lives outside the territories.
But her US citizenship means she can visit the region, and her latest film, "Slingshot Hip Hop", follows the fortunes of two groups of young Palestinian rap artists from the West Bank and Gaza.
With no formal funding structures to turn to, Reem Salloum explained that finding the finance for the film that took five years to make and won a number of awards, was an almost daily struggle.
"I went into credit card debt, I'm still in debt now. We held fund raising events. I sold art I had done. I set up a website where people could give donations with a Pay Pal button and of course most of the people on the film worked for free," she explained.
"We borrowed cameras, we didn't have any real equipment, but we just did it," she added.
Enas Muthaffar, a 31-year-old Palestinian director who lives in Jerusalem, summed up the problems, saying: "Palestinian cinema is the art of improvising."
But while all three women directors agree that funding is a major challenge, they also said the situation provides a certain artistic freedom they perhaps might not have had otherwise.
"In Palestine we don't have producers, there is no industry. But that also means I don't have a producer on my back telling me what to do," said Muthaffar.
Naous said she was so used to the idea of being a truly independent filmmaker, that when Franco-German television station Arte expressed an interest, "I thought, if Arte want to buy this, what's wrong with it?"
But financial hardship is not the biggest of their problems. Like so much else in Palestinian society, the conflict with Israel is never far away.
"Money is a problem but it is not the major problem. There is also the question of access," said Muthaffar, whose work regularly deals with the social consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The young filmmaker said she had wanted to make a film in Gaza following the recent Israeli military offensive that saw more than 1,300 Palestinians killed, but could not obtain permission from the Israeli authorities to travel to the territory.
"Gaza is only 40 minutes from my house in Jerusalem but I cannot go in there and make the film that I want to make," she complained, saying that the Israeli authorities regularly tried to interfere with her work.
There is also a serious problem when it comes to distributing Palestinian films.
There is only one cinema worthy of the name in all of the West Bank and Gaza -- the Al Kasaba in Ramallah in the West Bank -- for a population of almost four million. But of course the roughly one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza have little hope of visiting Ramallah in the current political climate.
"We go all over the world, yet you have people in places like Nablus or Jenin who don't know Palestinian films, who haven't seen them," said Muthaffar, referring to two West Bank cities.
The opportunities for seeing these films are slightly better for Palestinians in the diaspora. But even here directors like Naous, Muthaffar and Salloum face an uphill struggle.
"In Lebanon, they prefer to watch an American blockbuster than pay to see a movie about themselves," said Naous, adding that she understood that people who had to put up with hardship most days didn't necessarily want to be reminded of their troubles at the cinema.
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Copyright AFP 2009.
