Young Palestinian filmmaker Nagham Mohanna, who took part in the mediterranean/middle east documentary training program Storydoc (see below) sends this report on her journey back to her home via Egypt. I have made some small edits and language corrections:

Hello everybody, I hope everything is ok and not so horrible as I am feeling now. Let me tell you about my travelling because it is really amazing. I left Corfu at 7:25 am and arrived in Athens at 8: 20 am on Saturday. Stayed in Athens airport around 5 hours.

Left Athens at 2:30 pm and arrived in Cairo at 4:30 pm.

And here we begin. The opening of a torture journey. When an Egyptian officer saw that I am Palestinian the procedures were started, to know if they can let me enter Egypt or not.

While waiting in the airport and seeing how other people with other nationalities entered Cairo without any problems, they called me to investigate about my job and the workshop that I attended in Corfu. They told

me that maybe they will take me immediately to the border and not let me enter Cairo again.

I asked them how could that happen as I am a journalist and a girl and you have to show for me some respect! At 10pm they called me back and told me that I can enter Egypt, but that another Gaza filmmaker who attended the workshop will be expelled. I thought that I did not want to miss a big opportunity to discover the way and procedures of expelling, so I asked them to expel me with other people.

The procedures are: They called me into a special room where they put the Palestinians inside. It is not allowed for anybody to get out, actually it is not a room it is more like a prison. I sat with people and started to chat with them. It was really horrible what I heard and saw, from women, children and men in the same room, sharing the same toilet. There were people who had spent 4 days with their children – one of the children got sick and he spent time suffering the fever without seeing a doctor. Another spent a month inside this room without getting out. People are waiting for their flight and for visa to go to other countries like Saudi Arabia. Some young people prefer to spend many days in this room instead of going back to Gaza. I met lovely people there. I spoke with them a lot – the child Mahmoud who suffers from Autism, he was with his father and brother without his mother, who couldn’t travel with them because she does not have Palestinian ID so she couldn’t be with her children. I loved these kids, who kept coming to hug me.

At 1 in the morning they took us to another area at the old Cairo airport and put us in a room underground. This is really like a cell (3m x 5m)  and does not allow us to get out. The difficult thing was that I was so sleepy because I did not sleep well the last night, so I needed to sleep but the uncomfortable chair did not give me the chance to sleep. I am writing this section sitting in the room that I am talking about.

At 7pm in the morning they told us that they will take us to the bus, and now I am sitting in the bus going to the border. We are moving with the traffic of Cairo. I spent like 6 hours in the bus, slept around 2 and reached the border at 1:45pm. The good thing that I left the border at 3pm to Gaza I did not spend lots of time in the border, now I am going home, I miss my home, my bedroom and my bed for sure, home sweet home.

What I am really furious about is that the massage I made in the hotel in Corfu was gone, and really, I need extremely now 2 hour of massage to recover my bones again!        

So I am in Gaza  after travelling for two days, I am sure that each one of you took like hours to reach your home and sweet bed, but every thing has a different way when it reaches Gaza.

Storydoc is an EU supported training programme ”for filmmakers with Mediterranean projects”. The first 2010 session took place July 5-7 in Corfu, where these words are being written the day after a workshop that was full of heat outside and inside AND of passionate filmmakers with film projects at different stages of development. From the following countries: Greece, Germany, Romania, Scotland, Italy, France, Croatia, England, Latvia, Bulgaria, Palestine and Israel. 24 projects were worked upon with tutors (generalists, commissioning editors, directors, editors, distributors and producers) from Denmark, Greece, Israel, Palestine, France, Germany, Scotland, England, Finland and USA.

A workshop de luxe as said Cecilia Lidin from EDN referring to the amount of and quality of the tutors present, as well as the variety of projects.

Three long and intense days full of discussion and watching, everybody at the same hotel (swimming pool and beach to be reached by lift), eating together and the semifinals of the World Cup of football. Storydoc is run by Chara Lampidou and Kostas Spiropoulos helped by producer Rea Apostolides and me as responsible for content. The second session will take place in Athens, December 5-7.

French director Stan Neumann (photo) was one of the invited tutors.

www.storydoc.gr

The festival in Budapest ended with the main award being given to Peter Kerekes for his excellent ”Cooking History”, reviewed and mentioned on this site several times. The jury consisted of Bojána Papp director (Hungary),  Adina Bradeanu director and film critic (Romania) and András Müllner aesthete (Hungary). They gave the following motivation and some general remarks on the state of the art of documentary:

„We will start by noting that the international documentary competition at Dialektus has confronted us with a wide range of documentary films which were not only displaying different levels of artistic accomplishment but have also, stylistically, made us reflect on the wide range of possibilities opened to documentary film-makers today –  meaning by that what exactly we, as audiences, are ready to accept as ‘documentary film’ today, as opposed to, say, 50 years ago.

Some of the films screened have already been extensively awarded in the past year, subsequently reaching a status of almost ‘canonical’ works within the field of documentary film-making – we refer here to films such as Helena Trestikova’s RENE and Kim Longinotto’s ROUGH AUNTIES. Some others presented themselves as straightforward, at the same time entertaining and

chilly stories of access to yet uncharted political contexts – the case of |Linda Jablonska’s WELCOME TO NORTH KOREA. Finally, some of these films introduced some wonderful,  inspiring and powerful characters portrayed with compassion; characters which, although confronted with adverse conditions, did not allow themselves the luxury of self-victimisation and engaged on paths able to empower them and inspire others.”

„And it was by thinking about that sense of widened possibilities within the field of documentary film-making today that we decided to give the main award of our section to a film that stood out by being dramatically different from all the others  – a piece of elaborate film-making, which incorporates extensive staging and reconstruction to come up with a fresh perspective on the various bloodsheds witnessed by Europe from World War II onwards, by bringing imagination, perspective and a pinch of salt to our often didactic and linear understanding of history. The main award in the International Documentary section goes to a film that  appeared to us as the most accomplished embodiment of the term ‘creative documentary’: COOKING HISTORY, by Peter Kerekes.”

„Documentary has been for decades a genre able to inspire crowds and spread hope among the disenfranchised – and in this perspective, our commendation this year goes to GROWN IN DETROIT, a documentary about a group of underage mothers or mothers-to-be at the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit, who remain serene and start a small agro-business by which they redeem both themselves and their battered city.”