Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri: ‘If I could go to Gaza, I’d go with my camera tomorrow’

“The deaths and starvation of Palestinians like this have never happened before,” says Masri, the first Palestinian woman to direct a film, sharing her response to the continuing death and destruction in Gaza; the conflict between Israel and Hamas has already claimed the lives of more than 31,000 people, including over 10,000 children. Born in Amman (Jordan), and raised in Amman, Algiers and Beirut, Masri grew up as a child of two continents, and two languages. Her mother, Angela Kegler, was brought up in Texas. Masri owes her lifeline connection with Palestinian identity to her industrialist-philanthropist father, Munib al-Masri (90), who comes from Nablus, the West Bank city known as the centre of Palestinian resistance.

On her new film based on the war in Gaza

Growing up as a Palestinian in Beirut in the 1970s, Masri was a student activist and ‘very political’. “There were no Palestinian filmmakers then. I loved to draw and read. I loved art in general,” she recalls. Masri was bitten by the cinema bug as a 24-year-old when she had wandered into a film class in Berkeley (California) while visiting her brother on the campus, in 1976. “When I walked into a film class, I fell in love with cinema because it brought all these elements together — art, storytelling, visual language, politics and people. That is why I chose to become a filmmaker,” she asserts.

Masri made her first documentary, Under the Rubble, which is centred on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in 1983, along with her late husband, filmmaker Jean Khalil Chamoun (1942-2017); the duo founded Nour Productions in 1995. In scene after scene, the documentary captures the siege of the city and the massacres of Palestinians, notably in the camp of Shatila and Sabra neighbourhood, as well as the enforced departure of the Palestinian leadership and the fighters for Tunis. Making children as her protagonists was deliberate. “Children are imaginative. With adults, sometimes you know they are going to say, ‘I have heard that before’. Children are relatively free in their minds. They also let you go back to your own childhood. But I never abuse or manipulate them. It is not like I am trying to be naïve,” she says.

Over four decades after her debut, Masri says her appetite for telling stories of the suffering of Palestine to the world hasn’t diminished. Over 1,200 people were killed after the Hamas intruded into Israel on October 7, 2023. Talking about the recent conflagration between Israel and Hamas, she says: “My initial response was anger and sadness. Then I tried to channel my emotions into something tangible. I realised I have to do something. So I hit the paper and started writing.” The director of such films as Children of Fire (1990) and Children of Shatila (1998), who has shown her works in India before at the International Short and Documentary Film Festival of Kerala, is writing a fictional movie based on the “real people and real stories” from the war in Gaza. “The film will show a human side we haven’t seen yet. All the things we don’t see behind the death and destruction,” she says. 

“If I could go to Gaza, I would go tomorrow. I would go with my camera to be with the people. I think it is important to be their witness. That is what I always do with my films, to be there in the moment as it happens,” explains Masri, whose filmmaking has influenced a generation of young Palestinians. “But I can’t. I am not allowed to go to Gaza,” she laments. As a young woman, Masri would pick up her camera and travel across the Middle East region to tell stories, like the fictional drama, 3000 Nights (2015), about a young Palestinian school teacher imprisoned in an Israeli prison who gives birth to a boy; it was based on a true story. “I am from Nablus, the Mountain of Fire, the city which has always resisted occupation by the British and even Napoleon Bonaparte. Nablus and Gaza have been at the forefront of the Intifada (uprising),” she says.

‘They see themselves in me, and I see myself in them’

The deteriorating situation in the region has meant crossing boundaries is difficult for Palestinians. “Anyone with a camera is a target for assassination. That is a huge price for telling our stories. All Palestinians face this danger,” says Masri, who has been receiving footage from Gaza since the outbreak of violence. “People are sending me hundreds of images. My reaction to the ongoing violence is a mixture of feelings. But I am trying to see what I can do in a proactive way. I can bear witness and show the story of my people to the world. And make a difference. We can no longer merely express solidarity or feel sad. That is the last thing people in Gaza need. They need action,” she says.

Masri is reading a lot these days. “There are many people who are speaking out, including Israeli academics. As I write my own film, I am listening to all that. I feel I am there in Gaza and I am immersed there. That is the kind of films I make, not embedded films, but films immersed in our realities. Palestinian filmmakers and other filmmakers of the global South have to be close to our people. Will she make films in other countries? “I would love to,” says Masri. “I was attracted to Latin American cinema because they work a lot with political reality and magical realism. I relate to that style and use it in my films. Also, Iranian cinema and Indian cinema. I like the films of Mira Nair. Salaam Bombay! was one of my favourite films. It still is. That story can be told anywhere,” she adds.

But it’s Palestine that Masri feels she has a lot to say about: “That is where I should really focus.” Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, shot over five years (2000-2005), weaves together momentous moments in the lives of two groups of Palestinian children: one in a Beirut refugee camp, and another in the West Bank, near Bethlehem. On May 25, 2000, the Israeli army had withdrawn from South Lebanon after 22 years of occupation, leaving behind a trail of deaths, and imprisonments in Khiam and other prisons in the camps across the country. The barbed wire of the heavily militarised closed border between Lebanon and Israel had, for a brief moment, become a magnet, drawing hordes of elated and emotional Palestinians and Lebanese, who had not seen each other for decades.

It was a moment in history that fused the personal and the political. Among the crowds were scores of teenagers from Shatila camp in Beirut and Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem in the West Bank — laughing, chattering, dancing, and kissing each other through the fence. They opened their hearts on camera, sharing details of their daily lives, and their intimate thoughts. Interestingly, many of Masri’s child characters have followed in her footsteps. Tamara, one of the girls living in the refugee camp in Shatila in Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, is a filmmaker based in London. “Maybe they see themselves in me and I see myself in them,” says the filmmaker.