Fast paced and full of absurd comic situations, shot in black and white and wearing its affection for the French New Wave openly, Love, Theft and Other Entanglements is not what you’d expect from a film dealing with life in Palestine.
For their debut feature Muayad and Rami Musa Alayan defiantly tread their own path in a playful and innovative film that provokes laughs alongside a deeper exploration of the situation in Palestine. The film follows car thief Mousa who gets more than he bargained for when he steals a car with a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the boot. This sparks a series of chaotic events as Mousa tries to avoid getting into trouble with either side while managing his own turbulent private life.
After a successful premiere at the Berlin Film Festival that saw a packed auditorium receive the film very positively, Muayad and Rami, who co-wrote and co-produced as well as taking on the roles of Director and Director of Photography (Muayad) and Art Director (Rami), spoke to us to discuss the origins of the film, the unique approach they took to getting it made, and the difficulties that come from shooting in Palestine.
Flickfeast: This is your first feature. Where did the story come from?
Muayad Alayan: It was a bunch of ideas cooking. What was the start? It feels like it’s been years.
Rami Musa Alayan: You had the idea first about a guy stealing a car and it grew over time.
MA: I was thinking of a story of somebody who wants nothing to do with the troubles in our part of the world and then gets dragged into the middle of it. Somebody who’s really trying to solve his own personal problems and then he gets dragged into bigger problems that normally the world and the cinema audience expects to see coming out of stories from Palestine.
FF: The film is very funny. Was that your idea from the start?
RMA: We did want the story world to be strange as a lot of strange things happen over there. We wanted to capture that feel of the world being all awkward. We had never actually done comedy before so we were not sure how comic it was going to come out. Whenever we talk about it to people we start cracking up so it is funny but there’s a lot of drama. When we were writing it we felt like we were writing very seriously but when we talked it seemed funny so we thought it was probably going to be somewhere in between and we’re very happy it came out as funny as it did.
MA: We worked on creating the story world and characters to be dreamy and awkward but the events themselves are so real and so serious, the whole absurdity of the situation would be funny.
FF: How much of the comedy was in the script and how much came from the editing process? There are a lot of quick cuts and reaction shots that bring out the humour effectively.
MA: I think Sameer [Qumsiyeh] did a great job editing. I think the editing definitely helped to bring out the extremes but we already had it in the script. We set up individual scenes so Mousa would go through certain reactions.
FF: What was behind the decision to shoot in black and white?
RMA: We wanted to take out all the extra details that would make it look like a documentary version of Palestine and wanted to focus on the essential storyline of the film and give it the feel of a fairytale world.
MA: And people have stereotypical views of Palestine; the sun, the light, the colours the soldiers, and we wanted to add to that fairytale feeling of everything and decided to take it out in the black and white cinematic feel.
FF: You mentioned Jean-Luc Godard as an influence at the public screening Q&A. Are there any others that inspired this style of filmmaking?
MA: Apart from Godard I have to mention Jim Jarmusch as he’s been a big influence on me as a filmmaker. Not only in the film environment but in the way he makes films. He broke a lot of the rules of filmmaking. It’s really, really, really hard to get anything made in Palestine. When you’re working not with a low budget but with basically no budget it’s even harder and you have to be creative in finding ways to tell the story. So I think there are elements from Jim Jarmusch.
RMA: Yes, Jarmusch has the awkward world and the setting but he also inspired us from a production point. In early 2013 we were at a crossroads. Palestine had just signed a couple of co-production agreements with the UK and France and we could stand in a line and wait for five years for the chance to maybe get a co-production on this or we could jump in and do it. And we decided to do it. At least if it works we will have validated some other model to get films made in Palestine.
FF: Is the co-production route the only other option then?
RMA: There are not even many co-production options. There are no local funds so you’re entirely dependent on getting the funds from the limited amount available in Europe.
MA: Or some Arab funds but then again it’s not sufficient to get the movie done. You have to find easily one or two co-productions from Europe. And those funds are divided across the entire region, not just Palestine. That’s why we end up having one or two features at best over the last five or six years.
FF: Do you think a film like yours could have got funding from Europe or is there an expectation that a film from Palestine has to be a certain way?
RMA: It wouldn’t have been the same film. If it’s a co-production from the get go its developed to be a very different film. One that’s a seller, less artsy and more familiar. It probably wouldn’t have been black and white so many of the artistic choices would have been very different.
MA: And the partners would usually push in a certain direction to fit certain audiences. I’m so happy that I got the feeling from the screening that it worked for Arab and Palestinian audiences as well as Europeans so I think that was amazing. But when there’s money involved, producers will try to influence the script to fit whatever market they have in mind so it would have been really risky.
RMA: I think we’d have still been re-writing today if we’d have gone down that road.
FF: Do you think you’ll continue taking this same approach on future films?
MA: I really hope we can sustain this and develop it further. I hope we’re able to take this film to the world and it will enable us to make the next one and the next one and the next one, and hopefully with this model of production. I really hope it would have the snowball effect in the Palestinian filmmaking world, to encourage more filmmakers to go ahead and find solutions both in story and production. To go ahead and tell stories rather than waiting and waiting for funding. I’m not criticising the co-production model. Without that many Palestinian features would never have been made.
RMA: We’d use it ourselves one day if we get the chance.
MA: I think it’s a great development process going through the co-production labs, but there should also be another way of doing things. Not one single path.
FF: How careful do you have to be when you’re making a film in such a fraught region? There’s a line when an Israeli character says to Mousa you steal cars and he responds by saying you stole our country and an audience member asked you last night if that meant you’re condoning theft. How much do you have to think these things through?
MA: When you’re doing a film about Palestine you have to be careful. We’re always happy to get some people to think but not to get shot ourselves. You can get in trouble on both sides with the Israeli authorities or Palestinian factions. You have to be careful but at the same time there is a liberal window on both sides which allows us to criticise and be creative, break a few taboos. We’ll see when I go back of course.
FF: Is that where someone like Mousa comes in? A man who just gets dragged in without wanting to be involved in the political situation.
RMA: That’s the thing if you live there. I grew up trying very much not to be politically involved because you go to jail if you do. You grow up feeling that way. But politics doesn’t leave you alone. It just comes your way, you don’t go looking for it but it finds you. You get stopped, you get searched, you have no choice. It’s the way the reality is.
MA: If you go to the old city in Jerusalem as a Palestinian you’ll get stopped and questioned where you’re going. If you cross from Bethlehem to Jerusalem you have to get checked. They check your identity and number and where you’re going. There are so many things where even if you’re the most Zen person on earth you will get to be political at some point.
RMA: It’s not up to you how far you are from the politics as it comes right up to your nose every day.
FF: With that in mind did you run into any problems when you were making the film? I remember Hany Abu-Assad talking about the difficulties he had on Paradise Now [2005].
MA: When he shot Paradise Now things were harder. He was shooting in the middle of the invasion and he was shooting in one of the territories which had a lot of action. 2014 things are calmer though the restrictions are unfortunately much clearer. The borders are more settled with checkpoints and the walls. We still had to shoot some of the scenes in Area C which is entirely run by the Israeli army. We had to be careful and coordinate with the Palestinian police. They realised one of the locations we were filming in was 200m into Area C so they could not come and give us the machine guns for props as they had to coordinate with the Israelis. There is that kind of mess all the time. The costumes – you have to rent and make a cheque deposit to take the clothes into this area or that area.
RMA: The wardrobe guy actually made the uniforms but even though he has all the legal stuff for it it’s still not an easy road. We had to smuggle the soldiers’ clothes or police clothes over borders.
MA: When we were trying to get one of the right badges we went to the store and Rami was the Art Director and he had the wardrobe artist with him and they just needed the badge to fit on the costume and the owner sees these Palestinians walking in and was like no, no, no, I cannot sell this badge to you. We had the whole costume and just needed the badge but had to pass on it. You have to go through these things.
FF: How long did it take to make the film with these problems going on?
RMA: Shooting was nineteen days of production; throw in the breaks of three to four days. That was early April to early May 2014.
MA: Pre-production started October/November the year before. So we had six months of prep and casting. Then we had to postpone actual production for a couple of days because of permits. Sami [lead actor Sami Metwasi who plays Mousa] is from Bethlehem and to cross into Jerusalem we had to wait until the Easter holiday and then the military was two to three days late issuing permits so days got dragged.
RMA: We wanted to schedule shooting around Easter. We knew they would issue permits so we could shoot scenes around Jerusalem. So we had to get casting sorted in time for that.
FF: Did the film have to change as you encountered these obstacles?
MA: When you see scenes with machine guns you’re in Area A on the West Bank as the Palestinian police have access and security was there to guard us while filming. Whenever you see toy guns, you’re in Area C.
RMA: We had to have a plan B. If the Palestinian police didn’t show up we had to use the toy guns as well.
FF: You both took on several roles for the film [as well as co-writing and co-producing together, Muayad directs and serves as Director of Photography while Rami is the Art Director]. Would you want to do this on future films or was it out of necessity?
MA: I do admit that I love it. It’s tiring. We literally collapsed at the end of the production but I see the positive side. Because we co-wrote it you don’t need to spend time with a DP going over the beats and developing a style. With the art, as Rami was doing it, we already knew how the art and the wardrobe should look across the story. So in that sense it saved us time and I would love to do it again. I don’t know if there’s some kind of combination where you can have a more comfortable production and still do that and work with others because certainly when you have great DPs or Art Directors, they will bring something to it.
RMA: I would definitely like to have more assistants in the art department. I had between wardrobes and props easily some six hundred items to track and had only one person helping me. Maybe two when I borrowed somebody from the production.
MA: I guess maybe now when I look at it I feel so happy. I was so tired on the set itself. But when I see our gaffer, he was one of the militants, Rami – he was selling the falafel. I like it but I know its hell to do it that way.
RMA: But it worked.
Flickfeast would like to thank Muayad and Rami for taking the time to talk to us. Love, Theft and Other Entanglements premiered at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival on 6th February 2015.
