The Free Lance-Star · Fredericksburg, Virginia · 19 September 2014

CP-2014-018

Art during wartime, in the rubble of Gaza

CONFLICT ›› DESTRUCTION IS THE SUBJECT

Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, Gaza City

Transcribed from the clipping

“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian filmmaker Khalil Mozayen’s latest work was already complexly layered — a movie within a movie about a director and screenwriter producing a film about an honor killing in the Gaza Strip. Then the latest Gaza war burst in to add yet another layer: An Israeli airstrike leveled the 13-story apartment tower where Mozayen’s office, studio and archive were located. So he filmed the mountain of rubble and used it for the final scene of his movie, ‘Sarah 2014.’ Mozayen had hoped to create a film not connected to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But he and his screenwriter, Naim al–Khatib, said they decided they couldn’t avoid addressing the war. ‘It is like, as a Palestinian, you don’t have the right to have your own dream, that everything in your life has to have something to do with war and [Israeli] occupation,’ said al–Khatib, who also plays the fictional screenwriter in the movie. ‘The occupation crashed our privacy… and the war became an integral part of the film’s ending,’ he said. The themes and reality of war impose themselves on Gaza’s small but vibrant arts scene, and the latest war has been a powerful inspiration for its artists in their new work.”

Context added by this archive

The section header above the headline reads CONFLICT ›› DESTRUCTION IS THE SUBJECT. The story beneath it is about a screenwriter saying he is not permitted a subject other than destruction. The bracketed word in his quotation is the paper’s own. Both photographs on the page are credited to Palestinian Associated Press photographers, Basel al-Maqosui and Khalil Hamra; the top image is al-Maqosui’s own photograph paired with a painting by Pablo Picasso.

Cite this item

"Art during wartime, in the rubble of Gaza," The Free Lance-Star, 19 September 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-018. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-018

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