GIVAT HAVIVA, Israel — “You’d better come soon,” Yuda Lior says, when called to set up an interview. “I might be out of business before you get here.”
Lior, founder of the Communication Center for Peace at the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Haviva, is only half joking. It seems that since the start of the al-Aksa intifada in late September, a number of the coexistence projects he has been involved in have been put on hold or canceled.
But it is clear that the 48-year-old filmmaker isn’t going to let this violence keep him from his mission: documenting the Arab-Jewish relationship. Even if that means talking to people about their changing perceptions of coexistence since the start of the rioting in September.
“I call it my talking-heads project,” he explains. “At first it was just something to do to break the tension between the staff members at Givat Haviva; we were all sort of paralyzed by the news. People who had worked together for years — Jews and Arabs — were afraid to speak to one another. Both sides felt like the other side had betrayed their trust.
“So I turned my camera on. People found speaking to the camera was cathartic. There was this sense that this was truly a traumatic time, and here is someone capturing these feelings on film.”
And documenting the ups and downs of coexistence is one of the justifications for creating the center, a nonprofit organization specializing in collecting and producing documentary films and television programs about Arab-Jewish affairs.
“I figured that the shock, the immediate responses of Jews and Arabs to such horrible events, was probably the closest we could ever get to what the people really think,” he says. “I thought that maybe the same people who can’t sit in the same room might be able to hear what the other side has to say if it is edited into a movie. Being one step removed sometimes makes it easier for people to really hear what the other side is saying.”
It was hearing — and seeing — “the other side” that motivated Lior to set up the communication center in early 2000. Ten years ago, he packed in a flourishing career as a film and television producer in Ramat Hasharon and moved to Zichron Ya’acov to escape the urban rat race. He spent the next seven years traveling back and forth to the Negev making films for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and it was there, while directing a movie about genetic disorders among the Bedouin, that he first came face-to-face with the bleak situation of Israel’s unrecognized Arab villages.
“I saw how they live, in tents, no running water, garbage everywhere, and I felt so bad about it,” he says. “Before I saw it first-hand, I felt bad intellectually, but didn’t really understand. Seeing it, I felt that if only I could show it to others, they’d understand, too.”
And understanding, Lior believed, would lead to action.
Looking for a way to help, Lior naturally turned to the tool he best understood: filmmaking. He made contact with the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Haviva and on January 1 launched the Communication Center for Peace. Building the new center’s documentary archive is his major focus.
“TV people, foreign correspondents, people making films in this country are always asking for stock footage of Bedouin, and it doesn’t exist,” he says.
To that end, Lior will soon begin to solicit footage from Israeli filmmakers and television producers, which he will house in an as-yet-to-be-built facility at Givat Haviva.
Lior also plans to offer foreign filmmakers the services of Givat Haviva’s many experts in the fields of Arab-Jewish relations and Bedouin culture, as project advisers.
In addition to collecting other people’s productions in his archive, Lior himself will make films on the theme of Jewish-Arab relations through the newly launched center. He’s motivated in part, he says, by the small number of films devoted to this theme.
Since last year, he’s been working on three films: “Match Point,” which documents a year in the lives of young Arab and Jewish children picked for a joint tennis camp in Caesarea; “Duet or Duel,” which follows a group of Arab and Jewish teenagers as they write, direct and produce their own plays; and an unnamed film about efforts to clean up Nahal Alexander, a community that has been affected by pollution stemming from Palestinian cities. The project has been put on hold since the start of the rioting, but Lior hopes the organizers will be able to get back on track soon.
He’s also directing a film about changing values among the 120 Bedouin women who study at Ben-Gurion University, and hopes to begin filming “Poets of Wind,” an intimate piece about four women poets, Arab and Jewish, who each treat the same universal themes — motherhood, children, peace — in very different ways.
Filming recently began on “Match Point,” about the Arab-Jewish youth tennis camp. None of the children, or their parents, had previous social contact with each other.
“We show the possibility of such meetings, all over,” he says. “The camp is now beginning its second year, and some of the parents have begun meeting each other through their children’s lessons. It’s not friendship — far from it — but it’s a beginning,” Lior says. “We show the possibilities.” He will continue to film the children for an entire year, “to track the process of coexistence.”
Lior’s goals as a filmmaker are unabashedly political: He wants his films to act as vehicles for coexistence, as tools for peace between Israeli Arabs and Jews. He’s more interested in success stories than failures and won’t show a problem without suggesting a solution.
This is where Lior’s approach differs from that of Ebtesam Marana, a 24-year-old filmmaker from Fureidis who is working as Lior’s director on “Match Point.”
When she and Lior show up at the Caesarea tennis center to film the children from two Arab and two Jewish towns, Marana says she’s not interested in trying to get the kids to talk together “for the camera.”
“I’m not making this film to promote peace or coexistence, to show, ‘Look! Arab and Jewish kids play together so nicely in Israel!’ That’s not a true picture. These kids don’t even talk to each other most of the time. I want to show the real situation, not to lie to the people who watch my films.”
Still, although Marana insists her camera is value-neutral, she also states quite forcefully that she wants her films to help her people, a people she describes as Palestinian Israelis. Instead of seeking out stories of Arab-Jewish coexistence, as Lior does, she tries to focus on individual success stories, personal models that can both inspire young Israeli Arabs and contradict Jewish stereotypes.
“Many Jews don’t believe in Arab potential,” she says. “They think we’re all second-rate. I want to show Arabs who succeed.”