Nida Sinnokrot: A Palestinian Filmmaker`s Story of

Nida Sinnokrot: A Palestinian Filmmaker’s Story of the Wall|
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs | Robert Hirschfield| January-February 2007
Nida Sinnokrot: A Palestinian Filmmaker’s Story of the Wall
By Robert Hirschfield
“Palestine Blues” director Nida Sinnokrot (Courtesy Nida Sinnokrot)
NIDA SINNOKROT traces his work as filmmaker back to a little black box
in his parents’ home in Algiers. The box contained pictures of orchards,
family members, their family homes in Palestine. (His father is from
Hebron, his mother from Jaffa.)
“Those faded pictures created a story,” he recalled. “Here you have
filmmaking. The box is a theater. It has life. The pictures you have, you have to put together. And
that’s editing.”
The story he tells in his documentary, “Palestine Blues,” is in a way a continuation of the stories in
the photos. The characters may be different, years may have passed, but it is as if nothing has
changed. In “Palestine Blues,” Israeli bulldozers, like iron beasts, swallow up ancestral lands.
Sinnokrot, quiet, ironic, and younger looking than his 35 years, studied film at the University of
Texas in Austin.
“It was a traditional, conservative film program,” he said. “I never really fit in, because I was
making black-and-white 16-millimeter experimental films that didn’t have a beginning, a middle, or
an end.”
Balancing film as art and as political statement is the tricky part of being a Palestinian filmmaker.
The problem is not only shooting resistance footage in the West Bank and having an Israeli soldier
break your camera. It is finding oneself, in response to the endless nightmare of occupation, having
to negotiate a visual language dictated by circumstances.
He wrestles with this issue, said Sinnokrot, who lives in Brooklyn and travels widely throughout
Europe and the Middle East. “You have to use a certain language to honor the people you are
filming,” he explained, “and to offset the notions in the West about what the Palestinian struggle
looks like. You have to find a balance between the two.”
“Palestine Blues” finds Sinnokrot in Palestine in 2002. He is there to make a film about water, and
the politics of water, which bedevil Palestinians and indigenous people everywhere. One day, while
filming his daily walk through a checkpoint on his way to one of the water-rich areas of the West
Bank, he comes upon the village of Jayyous, where he finds Israeli bulldozers and Abu Azzam, the
hero of his film. Abu Azzam is an orchard owner soon to mourn the slaughter of his orchard for the
sake of the wall, then in the midst of construction.
“We grow 12 kinds of citrus fruits here,” Abu Azzam tells his visitor. “Anyone who wants to can
pick fruit from this orchard.”
Sinnokrot is shown the notice the old man received declaring that his land would be taken over for
military purposes. Abu Azzam holds the document in his hands like it is a death warrant.
“So, the story became his and his village’s nonviolent resistance against the wall,” Sinnokrot
related. It wasn’t hard getting people to tell their stories.
“They realize that’s the only way they exist in people’s eyes,” the director said. “If you can affect
people with a story, you have a chance of changing them. Palestinians are very media savvy. They
grow up with reporters in their backyard. The anchormen of Al Jazeera are the children’s heroes, or
the people they make fun of.”
We see the villagers of Jayyous linking arms against the Israeli soldiers, against their bulldozers. We
see the soldiers, with their big guns, pushing the protesters back so the bulldozers can plough
through. There are tussles, arrests, shots fired, stones thrown.
Then, the bulldozers have their way with Abu Azzam’s orchard, with the orchards of other villagers.
Sinnokrot filmed the same cycle of ravaging and resistance throughout the West Bank. Everywhere
he goes, villagers tell him that the wall will cut them off from their wells. “This a water wall!” a
man in Attil protests.
So Sinnokrot finds himself back with his original subject after all.
He’d position himself inside those historic moments “like a fly on the wall,” he said. Reminiscent
perhaps of the Palestinian director/actor Elia Suleiman (whom Sinnokrot greatly admires), who in
“Divine Intervention” bears witness, with his fly-on-the-wall persona, to the bullying and
humiliating of Palestinians at an Israeli checkpoint.
“Sometimes it helps to be invisible,” Sinnokrot said. “I just used those skills I learned as a child.”
But his camera, that extension of himself, was not invisible.
“I was jumped a few times by Israeli soldiers,” the filmmaker said. “One camera was stolen by a
commander. Another was broken. Fortunately, I had a lot of spare parts with me. At one point, 10
ISM (International Solidarity Movement) activists and one Israeli peace activist struggled with some
soldiers to get my camera back. They got it back—but they also got arrested.
Foreigners of all sorts pop up in “Palestine Blues.” The film begins with the iconic foreigner, Rachel
Corrie, whose picture a little boy in Gaza affixes to an Israeli tank like a holy medal of defiance. On
the other end of the spectrum are the Jewish settlers of Ariel. We are shown their red-roofed houses
that remind the director of Southern California.
“To buy into this fantasy,” he says in the voice over, “all you have to do is ignore the Palestinian
crossing the road with his furniture.”
As a child of displacement, Sinnokrot is acutely sensitive to burdened road-crossers.