Last Tuesday, as the credits rolled on a backdrop of fresh Palestinian rap after the screening of Junction 48, the packed Metrograph theatre broke in a thunder of applause.
The applause surged and swelled louder as the two main actors Tamer Nafar and Samar Qupty came in followed by the director Udi Aloni and writer Oren Moverman for a Q&A with the audience. Without any preliminary speech they jumped right in and picked out one of the dozens of hands stretched up high in hope of being able to question the cast.
Evidently the first question was about the music that fills and rhythms the film. A little voice asked where we could get the soundtrack of the movie and then, turning towards the director and writer, if it was the music or the script that came first. An sigh of relief dispersed itself through the crowd when it was announced the soundtrack would be released in the following days. The music was written by Tamer Nafar and he was quite pleased by the question as for him it was proof of good quality that people did not know what came first. In truth the script was born before the music. Once it was written Udi Aloni and writer Oren Moverman gave total freedom to Tamer Nafar to write the music and it couldn’t have turned out better.
One of the particularities of the movie and an aspect in which Aloni prides himself to is that it captures cultures scenes as well as everyday life instants that have never been shown on screen. One spectator had to ask if the nationalist Israeli rap scene depicted in the film truly existed. The cast looked amused as they replied that indeed they not only existed but where also a lot worse in real life than how they where shown in the film as they didn’t just confine themselves to their clubs and bars but actually went out to destroys the stages where Palestinian artists where to perform.
This lead on to the question of knowing how they came up with the story and if it was inspired by true events. Aloni took the microphone and told us the construction of the film was mainly build on his great and long lasting relationship with Nafar: “When I came to Tamer’s house in 2001 and I met him, his young brother and his amazing father, the minute I heard his lyrics, his voice and his energy and at the same time his toughs about what it is to be Palestinian, what it is to be a feminist and an inhabitant of this hood I felt that I heard a new voice and we fell in love right this day. From this very day we did many projects together. Tamer is in almost every one of my films and when he went on tours I was there even sometimes holding the light so what you see here is an organic growth of this bi-national language that we try to create together as a new art. And on the road amazing people, a bit more talented than us like Oren and James joined this trip and helped us to be very professional because we say all the time that true resistance is high quality.”
On the veracity of the events it was Nafar’s time to speak. He mentioned a thin line between reality and fiction but prefers to call this film “inspired of true events. For example, I don’t have a drug dealer friend whose house was demolished but Lod, my neighbourhood, is very well know as being the biggest drug market in the middle east and we have had more than 300 houses demolished by the Israeli government so it’s inspired by real stories. In the movie the house is going to be demolished so the government can build the Coexistence Museum. This actually happened in Jerusalem where the government destroyed a whole Muslim cemetery to build the Coexistence Museum.” He later on continued talking about how accurately the events in the film where depicted by telling us how many of his friends from his neighborhood, after seeing the film and particularly the first scene of a drug bust by Israeli police, called him up and to tell him they where at that particular drug bust. Of course Aloni had just invented a drug bust for the sake of film but the events where so faithful the spectators tough it was actual piece of their lives that had been recreated and filmed.
The attention then turned to Samar Qupty, the female protagonist of the film and the incarnation of oriental grace and charm. After having answered the inevitable question of whether she was single or not she went on to talk about how she got casted for the part and about the language repartition in Israel as in the movie the actors speak Arab and Hebrew. To her this was a question of upmost importance as language is where segregation starts. She has done her studies in Film and Production in Tel Aviv and was actually going to be a production assistant on Junction 48. As she read the script she asked Aloni if he had settled on an actor for the part of Manar, which he hadn’t. She went through the casting selection and got the part but one of the problems was she had never sung before. She then took voice training to try and convince the production to use her own voice in the film soundtrack. During her studies and her first years working in production in Tel Aviv she told us that because of the language barrier she always “felt like a stranger”. Indeed, most Israelis don’t speak Arabic or even refuse to speak it whilst most Palestinians are bilingual. Aloni took over saying he felt exasperated when he would call camera crews or production companies that would refuse to answers in an other language than Hebrew. He decided that this movie would be done on the essential condition that his crew where to be half Israeli and half Palestinian, creating a bi-lingual hence bi cultural team. Amar spoke of the “precise and strange language of Lod that mixes up words from Hebrew, Arab but also a lot of cultural references to the rap world in English.”
Finally, the last question glided on the subject of whether or not the political context in the middle east was encouraging creation and artistic vocation. In Tamer Nafar’s words, “the Palestinian people feel week, they feel like they are trapped, pushed down upon and constantly under pressure. To admit this weakness is already the start of something. And a way of expressing it is through art.”