October 8, 2025 • 32 mins
Hey, folks. This week, NO SUCH THING is hosting Origin Stories, a new podcast from Campside Media. Each week, veteran journalist Matthew Shaer talks to a different writer or director about the creation of a work close to their own hearts, and this episode is the perfect example. Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Srouji is the creator of the critically-acclaimed documentary "Three Promises," which uses his mother’s old home video footage to tell an intimate story of life during the Second Intifada. Srouji talks to Matthew about coming to documentary film as a newbie and learning the tools of the trade on the job. He also discusses the difficulty of finding distribution for “Three Promises,” despite the project being largely apolitical. Listen to Origin Stories.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, many here. No such thing is actually off
this week, but don't worry because we still have something
for you to listen to. This week, we're hosting an
episode of Origin Stories, a new show from Campside Media.
Every week, on Origin Stories, veteran journalist Matthew Cher talks
to a writer or a director about a project close
to their heart. On this week's Origin Stories, Matthew talks
(00:22):
to a Palestinian filmmaker who uses his mother's old home
video footage to tell a story about what it was
like to live in the West Bank during the Second Intifada.
No such thing will be back next week, but in
the meantime, enjoy this episode of Origin Stories Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Suha films everything, birthdays, bedtime routines, Chris mess and holidays.
She lives in the West Bank with her husband and
two young children. She's got a relatively comfortable middle class life,
(01:08):
but all that changes in the early two thousands during
what's known as the Second Intofada, a mass Palestinian uprising
against the Israeli occupation. When Israel launches a round of
retaliatory attacks, Suha does what she's always done. She picks
up her camera and films it all, the barrages of bombs,
(01:32):
the late night sheltered in the basement, her children's panic,
and somehow even in the middle of it all, Suha
captures an intimate and truly remarkable portrait of life under siege.
Nearly two decades later, her son Yusef, finds the home
(01:54):
video footage. Yello Jima read great dim yellah habit is up.
There are some, Yusef, for some the iraland wish, for
(02:15):
some the ertanic bar suit.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I would look at myself and I would just see
two empty black holes as I was hearing my mom
described me as a child the same way that I
saw myself in my most vulnerable moment that killed me.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And he decides to finish the story his mother started.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
She's like, when I was filming it, I hope that
one day we could share it with the world. And
I told her, well, I think that day has come.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
That's this week on Origin Stories. Welcome back to Origin Stories.
(03:07):
Today we're going to be talking to Yusef Cheruzi, the
award winning documentarian. Yusef grew up in Palestine but left
when he was young and finished high school in Qatar.
Studied Economics at the University of British Columbia. He's also
got a master's in development economics from Berkeley. He did
not take the traditional route to filmmaking, in other words,
(03:29):
but about six years ago he and a friend, Mary
el Ollentine, began assembling a documentary about Yusef's time during
the Second Intafada, the years long Palestinian uprising against the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As source material,
they used hours of home footage captured by Yusef's mother,
(03:51):
of the family attempting to survive in a time of
pitched conflict. It's a beautiful documentary. There's fear and anguish,
but also real joy, real love, and above all the
sense that life doesn't stop in battle. He carries on
one way or another. Three Promises won the Harrald Award
(04:12):
for Best Documentary at the nineteenth annual Camden Film Festival,
and was also a finalist for the twenty twenty five
Henry Award for Public Interest Documentary at Harvard. Yusef, Welcome
to Origin Stories.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Thank you, Matt, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I want to start here with the unconventional path to
this documentary. So we're dealing with footage that is old,
that was captured a while back, and in the meantime,
after this footage is captured, you go off and have
a different kind of career. Talk to me about when
you make this decision. Okay, I've got this amazing footage
(04:50):
here and I want the world to see it.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
It was about fifteen years from the events until I
found the footage again. So we had left Palestine in
two thousand and three, and in twenty eighteen, as you mentioned,
I was doing my masters at Berkeley. I had met
Mary Elle there and she had background in filmmaking, and
she had grown up in a pro Palestinian family, so
she was excited to meet someone who grew up in
(05:13):
Palestine and was asking me questions about my time living
in the Second End to father. So that triggered some
of my own questions that I had for my parents,
unanswered questions that I grew up with and haven't thought
about in many years. I was visiting my parents, we
were out for dinner, and I started asking my dad specifically,
(05:33):
just as a young man, and I was curious, you know,
what it was like being a father, a man in
his early thirties going through such a thing, and he
was like, we have footage of that, and my mom
was not happy at the time that he mentioned it.
I was shocked. I was like, what do you mean,
we have footage. So as soon as we went home,
my dad had already digitized a lot of our home
video footage from the nineties and the early two thousands,
(05:57):
So we put in the DVD player, it off and
just five minutes into watching it, and you know, for
those who have seen the film, it was that footage
when we were me and my sister and my father
were hiding in my grandparents' basement where it was safer
and having our interactions, and just seeing five minutes of
that scene, I immediately felt an obligation, really deep down
(06:20):
that I have to share this. It's so rare to
see such intimate moments in a war zone, you know,
in a family that, for better or worse, can be
universally related to So I immediately asked my dad if
I could have all of the footage, and I told
my mom, I'm going to take this back to California
with me and I am gonna make a movie out
(06:43):
of it. And that's how it started. And I took
it back to Maryelle. The first thing I had to
do was translate all of it, put the English subtitles,
and watch all the hours that we had of footage.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
He said, if I want to ask you about the
fact that your family had all this foot and was
recording in this way, which strikes me as unusual at
the time. Now, we film everything, you know, when I
look through my phone, I film every aspect of my life.
But this was a time before we started doing that.
So what was it that drove your mother to make
these recordings.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I've asked my mother this question, and she said that
at the time she felt that maybe one day she
could share our story with the world. She mentions this
in the film as well. You know, the news media
weren't really speaking about what was happening in the second
in Fada back then, and there was no social media,
so if you don't watch al Jazeira Arabic specifically, you
(07:40):
have no idea what's happening. So you know, she felt
an obligation to pick up the camera on film. But
from my perspective as well, you know, we've always filmed.
I had more hours of footage in the nineties, like
pre into Fodo. Then I could count because my parents
filmed everything. They filmed every birthday, every Christmas, every event,
(08:01):
every time our friends came over from school and we
were playing. And I don't know where that came from.
I mean my grandfather, my dad's dad, also filmed a lot,
and he had a huge archive. He's from Nazareth and
kept old pictures of Nazareth from pre nineteen forty eight,
from pre the state of Israel, and had them all
organized in folders and was using Dropbox in like twenty
(08:23):
ten as like an eighty ninety year old man. Maybe
it's in the genes or in the household that my
parents grew up around. But the camera was always there
when we were kids.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
When you looked back and started watching these all again,
obviously remembered a lot of what had happened. But was
it different than what you remembered. Was there a gap
between what was in your head from these experiences and
what you saw on film?
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Lesser than I would have liked, to be honest, I
started to question if these memories that I have of
the second and to Faddos are memories that I made
up or that I dramatized. You know, memories tend to
shape and get reshapen over the years, but the footage
definitely provided validation for my memories that I think gave
(09:10):
me more power to move on and it gets stronger
because I stopped questioning whether these were just silly imaginations
of a child.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Do you have kids yourself now?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
No, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
When I watched the documentary, the most immediate visceral thought
was thinking about what your parents must have felt, because
when you're a parent, you want to shield your kid
from everything, right, and like the most horrifying parts of
this documentary to me were when you were scared or
children were scared. There's like a rawness to it that
(09:42):
is really remarkably terrifying to me.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, and this became more clear to me not only
through talking to my mom, but also more recently since
the war in Gaza started and the more recent like
Eron Israel war that was happening when on the daily
we're hearing and feeling missiles being dropped, like Tel Aviv
is just outside my window, I can see it. I
grew up feeling maybe deep down that the decision to
(10:08):
leave Palestine that my parents took was taken without my consent,
and now I'm back here in Palestine and I'm going
through that same process of oh do I leave? Do
I stay? But if I leave, you know, there's the community,
and there's all of this that we've been building for
so long, and all of this effort that we've been
trying to do. And that's exactly the same reasoning that
(10:29):
my mom was going through. But then on top of that,
she had kids, all right. So I'm sitting here going
through my own anxiety in this decision making process, and
then I remember my mom and I remember, Oh, thank
god I don't have kids, because this would be hell.
This would be hell. I can't even begin to imagine
what it's like. But you know, makes me more grateful
for the decisions they did make.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Did you have to take time when you were watching
the footage? I mean, I'm assuming this is a pretty
heavy emotional thing to watch, even though you do remember it.
How did you do it? Did you watch them alone?
Did you watch them with Maryelle? Did you watch them
with family?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Well?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I watched them alone. There was about five or six
hours of footage from the Intafad period, So I sat
through that took me about three months to go through
all of it translated and subtitle it, so I watched
every scene possible more than once in that process. At first,
I wouldn't be able to watch more than an hour
at a time without stepping outside, taking a breathe there,
(11:26):
crying a little bit, sometimes smoking a cigarette, grabbing a beer,
doing what I need to do to get back to it.
It slowly got easier, and I started seeing more of
the beauty in what was happening, rather than it still
validating these early childhood emotions that I have still in me.
So once I got past that, I'm like, what a
(11:47):
beautiful family, And despite everything that's happening, you know, I'm
so lucky that this is me and that's my mom,
and that's my dad, and that's my sister. And it
makes me so proud and to see that. Because there's
a lot of beautiful and funny and wholesome moments, but
there were some things that soothly killed me on the inside.
I mean, you know, there was that scene in the
trailer as well, where my mom describes the moment where
(12:08):
I lost my childhood. She describes me as like a
face with two empty eyes, like black holes soul. Thessize
that's how she saw me. Me and my mom during
my teenage years, we didn't have the best relationship, and
I went through a really rough period depression and dealing
with PTSD and things like that. And when I would
look in the mirror during that time, that's how I
(12:30):
would see myself. And I never shared that with anybody.
I would be scared to look at myself in the
mirror because I would look at myself and I would
just see two empty black holes as eyes. And then
the first time hearing my mom described me as a
child the same way that I saw myself in my
most vulnerable moment, that killed me. I started crying immediately,
and I called my mom and I told her.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I fully believe that the passage from childhood to adulthood
involves some hardening of the soul or something like that.
I've heard it described in different ways. It's like you
stop believing everything that you're told. You lose a vulnerability,
I guess is the way to put it. And it's
a remarkable and terrifying moment because I have kids. I
(13:12):
just kept putting myself in your parents' shoes and thinking like,
what a horrible thing to experience, which also made me
curious when you said I've been looking through these and
I want to make them public. Was your family ever
like maybe not? Maybe?
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Wait No, my mom at first didn't really believe me.
And I know this because when we got our first
grant and I told her, She's like, oh, so this
is really happening. I'm like, yeah, I've been working on
this for a year. So at that point I had
to back down with her and be like, are you
sure that you're okay with this? And she's like, when
I was filming it, I hope that one day we
(13:49):
could share it with the world. And I told her, well,
I think that day has come. And later on in
the process, she had some concerns that she might come
off as a bad mom, that she could have done
more to pretec all of her insecurities came up. But
there was a lot of conversations obviously off camera between
me and my mom about that and me reassuring my
mom like, you're a superstar, Like you're the best mom
I could have ever asked for. That, Like, if we
(14:11):
left earlier, you don't know what would have happened. Then
if we stayed longer, you don't know what would have happened,
and we are where we are today because of your decisions.
Once you started getting love from the audience's, her confidence
came back.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I have a logistical question, which is this. You're trained
in a totally different discipline. You came up in a
different world. Is there a point when you sat down
and like, I'm going to teach myself how to make
a documentary? Did you download software and start to teach
yourself how to use it? How did you go about
this process?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, exactly that I download a premiere pro and figured
it out. I mean, it doesn't take that much to
do the very basics, right. I knew at some point
I would have to hire someone that actually knows what
they're doing to do the final touches. But I can
slice up scenes and put them in the order that
I think makes the most sense in terms of story
and narrative structure and things like that. So for me,
(14:58):
the vision was keeping get as raw as possible and
just showing insight into what it's like living in a
war zone. So I was like, Okay, this is a
good scene. I could follow it with this scene eventually
came up with a rough assembly by myself, but then
after that, our editor took it to the next level.
I love her for all her patients as well, because
I went out to New York. She's based in Brooklyn.
I stayed there for two weeks and we were working daily,
(15:21):
and you know, she would tell me Jacob and Elka
and whatever, and I don't know what she's saying on
teaching me how to do it, teach me how to
do it. And she had the patients to be like, oh,
this is what this means, and this is what that means,
and this is how you do that.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Okay, Yeah, And did you have touchstones from other documentaries
that you admired, Were there TV docs or movies they
were like, this is my tone or this is the
approach I want to take.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Five Broken Cameras always came to mind, just it being
the only other Pelscee film about the second and to Fada,
as well as for Samma about the Syrian War Civil War.
For Sama was you know, definitely like a goal for me. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That's when she's talking to her daughter.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Right, exactly right. So it's this mom and her husband
is a doctor in the hospital and the mother is
filming everything and her husband is one of the last
to stay when the Russians start bombarding the city and
they have this baby born during the war, and then
they immediately leave the country. So her story is written
like a letter to her daughter explaining why they had
(16:24):
to leave and why they had to let go of
their home, and it was so powerful, and to me,
I was like, I'm in a position here to write
the follow up to that. I mean years later, when
Semma isn't a baby, you know, I was twenty six
when I started working on this. Other than those two
Nelson Kristen, who both worked on Midnight Traveler and Camera
(16:46):
Person and other documentaries that kind of have a similar tone,
we were lucky the s film and the Catapult program
and then later the Gotham Institute connected us with mentors
that relate to the aesthetic of our film or the
message of our film. So I was very lucky to
have access to those people and get feedback from them
(17:08):
as well.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
At what point do you start needing financial support? So
you decide you're going to start to do this, You're
coming through the videos, you start talking to your mom,
and then at some point you're like, okay, this has
to become real, and you apply for the was the
Catapult grant where you started.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Yeah, and it was about ten thousand dollars. I mean,
we used most of that money to set up the business,
you know, do some of the legal as well as
do a professional restoration and digitization of the original tapes
because we wanted to make sure that the audio was
really good. That ten thousand dollars kept us going. We
eventually got grant funding from the Arab Fund for Arts
(17:45):
and Culture, and then we also got in kind services
from different pitch events. Right, we got one at the
Malmo Arab Film Festival at that Man International Film Festival
in Jordan. But we eventually had to do a crowdfunding
campaign on Seedent's Park and luckily we raised more than
we expected. That was to pay the editor. She offered
us half her rate on which she would usually charge.
(18:08):
Obviously not going to expect someone to work on this
for free, so we had to raise money to pay
for that because she was working on it for two
three months editing, and it's not cheap. Editors are not cheap,
especially editors in the US.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And you're working at the same time. I'm assuming you
and Mary all are both have day jobs. Yeah, exactly,
so would you do this at night?
Speaker 3 (18:26):
I worked out with a time difference, right because my
team was all in New York. So come seven pm
my time, they're working on things. I'm following up with
them on what's happened on email. And we had a
weekly calls to catch up on everything, and then me
and Mattot would She would send over like clips or
things that she's edited, and you know, I'd give her feedback.
But eventually got to the stage where like, okay, for
(18:48):
us to get to the finish line, yusef and note
need to sit down together there and do it. So
I took two weeks off work and flew out to
New York and just spent it looking over her shoulders.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
So this is your first time making a film like that?
In your head, if you were wound to the time
when you have had those two weeks in New York,
what was the finish line in your head? How did
you envision it?
Speaker 3 (19:07):
At that time? We had approximately an eighty five minute film,
and I never really gave myself a time limit, but
I knew it was too long. My goal was I
need at least fifteen minutes gone. There are scenes that
are boring and I don't know why or where, but
I am getting bored. I don't want anyone to get bored.
I want people to leave wanting more. I wanted people
(19:29):
to finish the film and have to breathe. You know,
are you're watching the credits and you use that time
to just like zone out and breathe. That's the feeling
that I wanted. And she worked her magic. She brought
it down to seventy five and then and fifty five minutes.
She was pushing for the fifty five. I was pushing
for the seventy five. We landed on the sixty one minute,
(19:52):
mostly because for film festivals we needed to be sixty
minutes to be considered a feature.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
It can't be under an The forty to.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Sixty minute range is nonexistent in film festivals. If you're
over forty, you're too long for a short, and if
you're under sixty, you're too short for a feature, so
you get lost.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Welcome back to Origin Stories. Today, we're talking to Yusaf
Shrewzy about his documentary Three Promises. I want you to
tell me a little bit about the distribution strategy. So
you make the film, at what point do you start
thinking about Okay, I've made this thing. I'm making this
thing that I love. Now I'm going to need people
to hear it. At what point in the process do
(20:37):
you start thinking about who's going to distribute it.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
It was the Gotham Institute. We had a fellowship with them,
so they had a week long program that was dedicated
to distribution and sales for first time filmmakers. Was perfect.
I didn't even know the levels of bureaucracy and confusion.
I just thought you could just get an agent and
they'll sell it for you. I'm not proud to say this,
but I am happy to say that I dumped that
on Maryelle. I'm like, hey, you're the producer. I have
(21:03):
no idea what's going on here. Because when we first
started working on it, she asked me, what do you
want to do with this. I'm like, I don't know,
just put on YouTube. And she's like, no, you're not
going to do that. So she started applying to the
grants and to the festivals, and we won't take into distribution.
You know. She was already plugged into the network. So
she had some names that she thought would like this film,
and we were reaching out. We got a lot of Oh,
(21:23):
this is a beautiful movie, but we're not going to
take it. In North America. No one was touching our film.
We got a lot of great feedback from all the
big names, small names, independent names, but no one wanted
to sell it. In the Middle East. We early on
got a distribution deal from friends that we met through
the Man International Film Festival and the Melmo Arab from Festival,
and they were supported from the beginning. So I trusted
(21:46):
them that they'll do their best, and they did. They
put it up on the largest local streaming platform, and
now Watermelon Pictures has done the same for us in
North America. Thank god.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Well, let's address the elephant in the room, which is
that the people were nervous probably distributing a movie that
touches on the Middle East conflict in any way. Right,
it's a third rail.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
I completely understand that. I just worked so hard on
making this film apolitical. We don't talk about why the
NDI thought is happening. We don't mention Israel in depth.
There are no normative statements happening about the occupation. You're
simply living with a family going through a war zone,
and it's like even that you're Scared to Touch were
(22:28):
released in March twenty twenty three and Warren Gaza started
and it started getting a lot more interest from festivals
all over the world. Listen, maybe my film's not that good, fine, right,
but no other land just want an Oscar and they
don't have a distribution company. That's insane.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It depresses me the way that this topic, in any
form of journalism people worry about touching it in any way.
The preconceptions, the loadedness of it scares people, and I
understand why. But it also this makes me, from a
journalist's perspective, that there's stories that are probably going unheard
(23:05):
or untold or undistributed because of people's fear. And yeah,
I mean to your point, I would never say this
is a political movie. It's a movie about a family
and what life is really like in these situations, which
to me again is the most astonishing part of it.
We're so used to be bombarded with images of the
worst atrocities that one can imagine on social media, and
(23:30):
for me, one effect is that it flattens my thinking
about what's happening in Palestine to pure destruction, which, of
course on one level it is, but there's also a
fact in which life does have to carry on. People
still have to exist in some way, and we never
get to see that those aren't the images that we see.
(23:51):
And that's what I found so moving about it. Families
still have to exist, they have to move around, and
they have to be families.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Agree, And I think as important as it is that
these images that we're seeing that are coming out of
these places, because I do think that with the over
influx of photos and videos that are coming out of
places like us, and the limitations or the fears that
we were just speaking about in journalism circles and documentary
(24:20):
circles and film circles is slowly dwindling because at some
point you have to face the elephant in the room,
right like when the elephant is that big. But it
does kind of desensitize us a little bit and makes
it hard to continue watching because it's not even possible
to process five second clip of someone picking up pieces
of their baby. I'm sorry, but I know this from
(24:42):
deep within my heart that the film's coming out of
the Gazen people, where whatever their future looks like in
the next five ten years are going to be a
killing And I really hope that by then the world
is ready to watch them and to support them and
to distribute them.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I suspect they will. What I I hope that people
would get out of a movie like yours is you know,
you can understand through one family's experience, and it doesn't
have to be like a pure catastrophe. It doesn't have
to be the kind of images that we get bombarded
with on TV. Now you can feel how the enormity
(25:18):
of a conflict in a much more subtle way, which
is what makes the movie so successful.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
To me, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
I want to ask you a little bit about the
film festival's circuit and the kind of reactions you've got.
You were all over the world, right, you probably don't know,
but how many festivals and screenings do you think you had?
Speaker 3 (25:37):
More than I could count and in countries all over
the world. I mean, the one that was a smack
to the face was the DMZ Film Festival between North
Korea and South Korea. There's a city there on the
border and my film was playing there, And how the
did my film get all the way there?
Speaker 2 (25:55):
You know?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, No, I've been so grateful for the film of
all life that my film had.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Had Did people see the movie and the way that
you thought they would see the movie? In other words,
this is so personal and you have so much wrapped
up in it, and you created it. When people were
watching it and asking you questions or commenting on it,
were there surprises and how they saw it? Or was
it what you expected?
Speaker 3 (26:20):
The surprises came when I noticed people were seeing beyond
basic questions. The usuals are how I came to make
this film and how I felt making the film, why
my mom was filming in questions about my mom, and
then my sister is freaking out the most, how is she?
When I got questions that where people saw beyond that
(26:41):
was where I really felt like, oh wow, I don't
know who you are. You live in a country halfway
across the world, and you're seeing that which I intended
for people to see. Little things about my dad, for example,
like my dad reading Harry Potter to us and kind
of his role and most people don't catch that right,
but few fathers out there did because they were paying
(27:02):
closer attention to what my dad was doing. But what
surprised me the most was I did not receive a
single negative comment or any type of passive, aggressive or
anything that was just pure love and support, especially in
North America. A True False Film festival was where it
really hit me. It's like a college town, like an
(27:25):
hour's drive from Saint Louis, I mean, Jesus country, right
like Billboard's saying, Jesus will save you and call this
number and Jesus will answer, and you know the Trump flags.
Not only did everyone there know who I was, which
felt really weird because it was a very small, intimate festival,
but they were all so supportive, and all these old
(27:48):
white Americans who were like locals from Missouri coming and
having in depth conversations with me about it and clearly
very propousity, various empathetic to me. That was mind chattering.
They did have a security detail for me at that
festival because they were getting some threats, but if they
hadn't told me, I wouldn't have noticed.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
You've made a massively successful documentary. You're back in Palestine.
Are you making something now? Are you working on a
new documentary or was this a one thing you just
wanted to try it and now you're going to go
back to your day job.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
I've been focusing on my day job since we released
the film more than anything, and I don't think it's
the end of my storytelling career. I don't know how
I feel about filmmaking again. I'm definitely open to using
that medium. I have more stories to tell. I have
my grandparents' stories to tell as well that they've archived
and they've written in places, and I'd love to find
(28:48):
ways to share them in the future. But I don't
like to depend on the creative process for my income.
Let's put it that way. When it becomes a need
for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.
And I feel that way about everything really. But the
last few years I've been focusing on the startup here
of a consulting company and a nonprofit like think tank.
(29:09):
Me and my partner is locally. A lot of work
has been putting into that. You know, we're really trying
to give back to the community and to build a
progressive base for Palestinian news, to empower them and hopefully
see change in the future. But with the current situation,
it's hard to tell what tomorrow holds. I know for
a fact I'll be back to storytelling, though sooner or later.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yes, do you think of three promises as a political movie.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Not at all. Like I said, it's a film about
a family living in a war zone, and it just
so happens to be a Palestinian family living in Palestine
under Israeli occupation. That's facts, it's not politics.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I asked, because I am so curious about the fate
of storytelling that feels at all political in this day
and age. So a little bit of what I was
talking about earlier, where anything that even touches on something
that can say that are third rail gets judged before
it comes out. This is true not just of the
(30:06):
conflict in Palestine. It's true of American politics when it
comes to Trump with domestic terrorism. You know, it's like
there's certain topics that are very hard to reach people with.
You can make it, but will people actually consume it.
So I wonder if you have suggestions or thoughts when
somebody is telling a story like the one that you did,
(30:28):
that some people are going to view one way or
another as political, how do you get them to still
pay attention.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Keep it row if it's coming from a place where
you're not virtue signaling, You're just like, this is how
it is. It's from an emotional place. It is from
the deepest places in my heart. Looked at this film
from a pure, innocent child's perspective. Don't add anything. There's
no need to send signals that occupation is bad, or
(30:56):
that Israel is mean, or that Palestinians have the right
to resist or whatever. This is simply a story of
humans living in a human created problem and they're dealing
with it, and the world needs to see it for
what it is. Let the audience decide what their politics are.
If they see your film and become more extremist, then
(31:17):
it's probably a problem with them, and no matter what
messaging you put into your film, that's not going to
change their thoughts. I think the most powerful thing we
have as humans is our ability to share our emotions
with each other, and that's what makes us social animals,
and so it makes us who we are.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
So ironic about that is that when you do let
people decide, the effect is often more emotionally strong, like
you're able to reach more people if you don't try
to make up their minds for them.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
It's a truly beautiful film. I hope you are so
proud about it, and you said thank you so much
for doing this.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Thank you, Matt, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Three Promises is now available to stream in North America.
You can find out on Apple TV in Prime Video
by searching three Promises. Origin Stories is a production of
Campside Media, hosted by me Matthew Cher and produced by
abacar Adn. This episode was sound designed by Garrett Tiedeman,
(32:19):
theme music by Doug Slawan. Our studio engineer is Jimmy
Guthrie at Arcade one sixty Studios. Special thanks to Michael
Kenyon Mayer at Campside and Chris McLeod at Blue Elevator
Productions
Hey, everyone, many here. No such thing is actually off
this week, but don't worry because we still have something
for you to listen to. This week, we're hosting an
episode of Origin Stories, a new show from Campside Media.
Every week, on Origin Stories, veteran journalist Matthew Cher talks
to a writer or a director about a project close
to their heart. On this week's Origin Stories, Matthew talks
(00:22):
to a Palestinian filmmaker who uses his mother's old home
video footage to tell a story about what it was
like to live in the West Bank during the Second Intifada.
No such thing will be back next week, but in
the meantime, enjoy this episode of Origin Stories Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Suha films everything, birthdays, bedtime routines, Chris mess and holidays.
She lives in the West Bank with her husband and
two young children. She's got a relatively comfortable middle class life,
(01:08):
but all that changes in the early two thousands during
what's known as the Second Intofada, a mass Palestinian uprising
against the Israeli occupation. When Israel launches a round of
retaliatory attacks, Suha does what she's always done. She picks
up her camera and films it all, the barrages of bombs,
(01:32):
the late night sheltered in the basement, her children's panic,
and somehow even in the middle of it all, Suha
captures an intimate and truly remarkable portrait of life under siege.
Nearly two decades later, her son Yusef, finds the home
(01:54):
video footage. Yello Jima read great dim yellah habit is up.
There are some, Yusef, for some the iraland wish, for
(02:15):
some the ertanic bar suit.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I would look at myself and I would just see
two empty black holes as I was hearing my mom
described me as a child the same way that I
saw myself in my most vulnerable moment that killed me.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And he decides to finish the story his mother started.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
She's like, when I was filming it, I hope that
one day we could share it with the world. And
I told her, well, I think that day has come.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
That's this week on Origin Stories. Welcome back to Origin Stories.
(03:07):
Today we're going to be talking to Yusef Cheruzi, the
award winning documentarian. Yusef grew up in Palestine but left
when he was young and finished high school in Qatar.
Studied Economics at the University of British Columbia. He's also
got a master's in development economics from Berkeley. He did
not take the traditional route to filmmaking, in other words,
(03:29):
but about six years ago he and a friend, Mary
el Ollentine, began assembling a documentary about Yusef's time during
the Second Intafada, the years long Palestinian uprising against the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As source material,
they used hours of home footage captured by Yusef's mother,
(03:51):
of the family attempting to survive in a time of
pitched conflict. It's a beautiful documentary. There's fear and anguish,
but also real joy, real love, and above all the
sense that life doesn't stop in battle. He carries on
one way or another. Three Promises won the Harrald Award
(04:12):
for Best Documentary at the nineteenth annual Camden Film Festival,
and was also a finalist for the twenty twenty five
Henry Award for Public Interest Documentary at Harvard. Yusef, Welcome
to Origin Stories.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Thank you, Matt, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I want to start here with the unconventional path to
this documentary. So we're dealing with footage that is old,
that was captured a while back, and in the meantime,
after this footage is captured, you go off and have
a different kind of career. Talk to me about when
you make this decision. Okay, I've got this amazing footage
(04:50):
here and I want the world to see it.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
It was about fifteen years from the events until I
found the footage again. So we had left Palestine in
two thousand and three, and in twenty eighteen, as you mentioned,
I was doing my masters at Berkeley. I had met
Mary Elle there and she had background in filmmaking, and
she had grown up in a pro Palestinian family, so
she was excited to meet someone who grew up in
(05:13):
Palestine and was asking me questions about my time living
in the Second End to father. So that triggered some
of my own questions that I had for my parents,
unanswered questions that I grew up with and haven't thought
about in many years. I was visiting my parents, we
were out for dinner, and I started asking my dad specifically,
(05:33):
just as a young man, and I was curious, you know,
what it was like being a father, a man in
his early thirties going through such a thing, and he
was like, we have footage of that, and my mom
was not happy at the time that he mentioned it.
I was shocked. I was like, what do you mean,
we have footage. So as soon as we went home,
my dad had already digitized a lot of our home
video footage from the nineties and the early two thousands,
(05:57):
So we put in the DVD player, it off and
just five minutes into watching it, and you know, for
those who have seen the film, it was that footage
when we were me and my sister and my father
were hiding in my grandparents' basement where it was safer
and having our interactions, and just seeing five minutes of
that scene, I immediately felt an obligation, really deep down
(06:20):
that I have to share this. It's so rare to
see such intimate moments in a war zone, you know,
in a family that, for better or worse, can be
universally related to So I immediately asked my dad if
I could have all of the footage, and I told
my mom, I'm going to take this back to California
with me and I am gonna make a movie out
(06:43):
of it. And that's how it started. And I took
it back to Maryelle. The first thing I had to
do was translate all of it, put the English subtitles,
and watch all the hours that we had of footage.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
He said, if I want to ask you about the
fact that your family had all this foot and was
recording in this way, which strikes me as unusual at
the time. Now, we film everything, you know, when I
look through my phone, I film every aspect of my life.
But this was a time before we started doing that.
So what was it that drove your mother to make
these recordings.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I've asked my mother this question, and she said that
at the time she felt that maybe one day she
could share our story with the world. She mentions this
in the film as well. You know, the news media
weren't really speaking about what was happening in the second
in Fada back then, and there was no social media,
so if you don't watch al Jazeira Arabic specifically, you
(07:40):
have no idea what's happening. So you know, she felt
an obligation to pick up the camera on film. But
from my perspective as well, you know, we've always filmed.
I had more hours of footage in the nineties, like
pre into Fodo. Then I could count because my parents
filmed everything. They filmed every birthday, every Christmas, every event,
(08:01):
every time our friends came over from school and we
were playing. And I don't know where that came from.
I mean my grandfather, my dad's dad, also filmed a lot,
and he had a huge archive. He's from Nazareth and
kept old pictures of Nazareth from pre nineteen forty eight,
from pre the state of Israel, and had them all
organized in folders and was using Dropbox in like twenty
(08:23):
ten as like an eighty ninety year old man. Maybe
it's in the genes or in the household that my
parents grew up around. But the camera was always there
when we were kids.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
When you looked back and started watching these all again,
obviously remembered a lot of what had happened. But was
it different than what you remembered. Was there a gap
between what was in your head from these experiences and
what you saw on film?
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Lesser than I would have liked, to be honest, I
started to question if these memories that I have of
the second and to Faddos are memories that I made
up or that I dramatized. You know, memories tend to
shape and get reshapen over the years, but the footage
definitely provided validation for my memories that I think gave
(09:10):
me more power to move on and it gets stronger
because I stopped questioning whether these were just silly imaginations
of a child.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Do you have kids yourself now?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
No, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
When I watched the documentary, the most immediate visceral thought
was thinking about what your parents must have felt, because
when you're a parent, you want to shield your kid
from everything, right, and like the most horrifying parts of
this documentary to me were when you were scared or
children were scared. There's like a rawness to it that
(09:42):
is really remarkably terrifying to me.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, and this became more clear to me not only
through talking to my mom, but also more recently since
the war in Gaza started and the more recent like
Eron Israel war that was happening when on the daily
we're hearing and feeling missiles being dropped, like Tel Aviv
is just outside my window, I can see it. I
grew up feeling maybe deep down that the decision to
(10:08):
leave Palestine that my parents took was taken without my consent,
and now I'm back here in Palestine and I'm going
through that same process of oh do I leave? Do
I stay? But if I leave, you know, there's the community,
and there's all of this that we've been building for
so long, and all of this effort that we've been
trying to do. And that's exactly the same reasoning that
(10:29):
my mom was going through. But then on top of that,
she had kids, all right. So I'm sitting here going
through my own anxiety in this decision making process, and
then I remember my mom and I remember, Oh, thank
god I don't have kids, because this would be hell.
This would be hell. I can't even begin to imagine
what it's like. But you know, makes me more grateful
for the decisions they did make.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Did you have to take time when you were watching
the footage? I mean, I'm assuming this is a pretty
heavy emotional thing to watch, even though you do remember it.
How did you do it? Did you watch them alone?
Did you watch them with Maryelle? Did you watch them
with family?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Well?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I watched them alone. There was about five or six
hours of footage from the Intafad period, So I sat
through that took me about three months to go through
all of it translated and subtitle it, so I watched
every scene possible more than once in that process. At first,
I wouldn't be able to watch more than an hour
at a time without stepping outside, taking a breathe there,
(11:26):
crying a little bit, sometimes smoking a cigarette, grabbing a beer,
doing what I need to do to get back to it.
It slowly got easier, and I started seeing more of
the beauty in what was happening, rather than it still
validating these early childhood emotions that I have still in me.
So once I got past that, I'm like, what a
(11:47):
beautiful family, And despite everything that's happening, you know, I'm
so lucky that this is me and that's my mom,
and that's my dad, and that's my sister. And it
makes me so proud and to see that. Because there's
a lot of beautiful and funny and wholesome moments, but
there were some things that soothly killed me on the inside.
I mean, you know, there was that scene in the
trailer as well, where my mom describes the moment where
(12:08):
I lost my childhood. She describes me as like a
face with two empty eyes, like black holes soul. Thessize
that's how she saw me. Me and my mom during
my teenage years, we didn't have the best relationship, and
I went through a really rough period depression and dealing
with PTSD and things like that. And when I would
look in the mirror during that time, that's how I
(12:30):
would see myself. And I never shared that with anybody.
I would be scared to look at myself in the
mirror because I would look at myself and I would
just see two empty black holes as eyes. And then
the first time hearing my mom described me as a
child the same way that I saw myself in my
most vulnerable moment, that killed me. I started crying immediately,
and I called my mom and I told her.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I fully believe that the passage from childhood to adulthood
involves some hardening of the soul or something like that.
I've heard it described in different ways. It's like you
stop believing everything that you're told. You lose a vulnerability,
I guess is the way to put it. And it's
a remarkable and terrifying moment because I have kids. I
(13:12):
just kept putting myself in your parents' shoes and thinking like,
what a horrible thing to experience, which also made me
curious when you said I've been looking through these and
I want to make them public. Was your family ever
like maybe not? Maybe?
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Wait No, my mom at first didn't really believe me.
And I know this because when we got our first
grant and I told her, She's like, oh, so this
is really happening. I'm like, yeah, I've been working on
this for a year. So at that point I had
to back down with her and be like, are you
sure that you're okay with this? And she's like, when
I was filming it, I hope that one day we
(13:49):
could share it with the world. And I told her, well,
I think that day has come. And later on in
the process, she had some concerns that she might come
off as a bad mom, that she could have done
more to pretec all of her insecurities came up. But
there was a lot of conversations obviously off camera between
me and my mom about that and me reassuring my
mom like, you're a superstar, Like you're the best mom
I could have ever asked for. That, Like, if we
(14:11):
left earlier, you don't know what would have happened. Then
if we stayed longer, you don't know what would have happened,
and we are where we are today because of your decisions.
Once you started getting love from the audience's, her confidence
came back.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I have a logistical question, which is this. You're trained
in a totally different discipline. You came up in a
different world. Is there a point when you sat down
and like, I'm going to teach myself how to make
a documentary? Did you download software and start to teach
yourself how to use it? How did you go about
this process?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, exactly that I download a premiere pro and figured
it out. I mean, it doesn't take that much to
do the very basics, right. I knew at some point
I would have to hire someone that actually knows what
they're doing to do the final touches. But I can
slice up scenes and put them in the order that
I think makes the most sense in terms of story
and narrative structure and things like that. So for me,
(14:58):
the vision was keeping get as raw as possible and
just showing insight into what it's like living in a
war zone. So I was like, Okay, this is a
good scene. I could follow it with this scene eventually
came up with a rough assembly by myself, but then
after that, our editor took it to the next level.
I love her for all her patients as well, because
I went out to New York. She's based in Brooklyn.
I stayed there for two weeks and we were working daily,
(15:21):
and you know, she would tell me Jacob and Elka
and whatever, and I don't know what she's saying on
teaching me how to do it, teach me how to
do it. And she had the patients to be like, oh,
this is what this means, and this is what that means,
and this is how you do that.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Okay, Yeah, And did you have touchstones from other documentaries
that you admired, Were there TV docs or movies they
were like, this is my tone or this is the
approach I want to take.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Five Broken Cameras always came to mind, just it being
the only other Pelscee film about the second and to Fada,
as well as for Samma about the Syrian War Civil War.
For Sama was you know, definitely like a goal for me. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That's when she's talking to her daughter.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Right, exactly right. So it's this mom and her husband
is a doctor in the hospital and the mother is
filming everything and her husband is one of the last
to stay when the Russians start bombarding the city and
they have this baby born during the war, and then
they immediately leave the country. So her story is written
like a letter to her daughter explaining why they had
(16:24):
to leave and why they had to let go of
their home, and it was so powerful, and to me,
I was like, I'm in a position here to write
the follow up to that. I mean years later, when
Semma isn't a baby, you know, I was twenty six
when I started working on this. Other than those two
Nelson Kristen, who both worked on Midnight Traveler and Camera
(16:46):
Person and other documentaries that kind of have a similar tone,
we were lucky the s film and the Catapult program
and then later the Gotham Institute connected us with mentors
that relate to the aesthetic of our film or the
message of our film. So I was very lucky to
have access to those people and get feedback from them
(17:08):
as well.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
At what point do you start needing financial support? So
you decide you're going to start to do this, You're
coming through the videos, you start talking to your mom,
and then at some point you're like, okay, this has
to become real, and you apply for the was the
Catapult grant where you started.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Yeah, and it was about ten thousand dollars. I mean,
we used most of that money to set up the business,
you know, do some of the legal as well as
do a professional restoration and digitization of the original tapes
because we wanted to make sure that the audio was
really good. That ten thousand dollars kept us going. We
eventually got grant funding from the Arab Fund for Arts
(17:45):
and Culture, and then we also got in kind services
from different pitch events. Right, we got one at the
Malmo Arab Film Festival at that Man International Film Festival
in Jordan. But we eventually had to do a crowdfunding
campaign on Seedent's Park and luckily we raised more than
we expected. That was to pay the editor. She offered
us half her rate on which she would usually charge.
(18:08):
Obviously not going to expect someone to work on this
for free, so we had to raise money to pay
for that because she was working on it for two
three months editing, and it's not cheap. Editors are not cheap,
especially editors in the US.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And you're working at the same time. I'm assuming you
and Mary all are both have day jobs. Yeah, exactly,
so would you do this at night?
Speaker 3 (18:26):
I worked out with a time difference, right because my
team was all in New York. So come seven pm
my time, they're working on things. I'm following up with
them on what's happened on email. And we had a
weekly calls to catch up on everything, and then me
and Mattot would She would send over like clips or
things that she's edited, and you know, I'd give her feedback.
But eventually got to the stage where like, okay, for
(18:48):
us to get to the finish line, yusef and note
need to sit down together there and do it. So
I took two weeks off work and flew out to
New York and just spent it looking over her shoulders.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
So this is your first time making a film like that?
In your head, if you were wound to the time
when you have had those two weeks in New York,
what was the finish line in your head? How did
you envision it?
Speaker 3 (19:07):
At that time? We had approximately an eighty five minute film,
and I never really gave myself a time limit, but
I knew it was too long. My goal was I
need at least fifteen minutes gone. There are scenes that
are boring and I don't know why or where, but
I am getting bored. I don't want anyone to get bored.
I want people to leave wanting more. I wanted people
(19:29):
to finish the film and have to breathe. You know,
are you're watching the credits and you use that time
to just like zone out and breathe. That's the feeling
that I wanted. And she worked her magic. She brought
it down to seventy five and then and fifty five minutes.
She was pushing for the fifty five. I was pushing
for the seventy five. We landed on the sixty one minute,
(19:52):
mostly because for film festivals we needed to be sixty
minutes to be considered a feature.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
It can't be under an The forty to.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Sixty minute range is nonexistent in film festivals. If you're
over forty, you're too long for a short, and if
you're under sixty, you're too short for a feature, so
you get lost.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Welcome back to Origin Stories. Today, we're talking to Yusaf
Shrewzy about his documentary Three Promises. I want you to
tell me a little bit about the distribution strategy. So
you make the film, at what point do you start
thinking about Okay, I've made this thing. I'm making this
thing that I love. Now I'm going to need people
to hear it. At what point in the process do
(20:37):
you start thinking about who's going to distribute it.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
It was the Gotham Institute. We had a fellowship with them,
so they had a week long program that was dedicated
to distribution and sales for first time filmmakers. Was perfect.
I didn't even know the levels of bureaucracy and confusion.
I just thought you could just get an agent and
they'll sell it for you. I'm not proud to say this,
but I am happy to say that I dumped that
on Maryelle. I'm like, hey, you're the producer. I have
(21:03):
no idea what's going on here. Because when we first
started working on it, she asked me, what do you
want to do with this. I'm like, I don't know,
just put on YouTube. And she's like, no, you're not
going to do that. So she started applying to the
grants and to the festivals, and we won't take into distribution.
You know. She was already plugged into the network. So
she had some names that she thought would like this film,
and we were reaching out. We got a lot of Oh,
(21:23):
this is a beautiful movie, but we're not going to
take it. In North America. No one was touching our film.
We got a lot of great feedback from all the
big names, small names, independent names, but no one wanted
to sell it. In the Middle East. We early on
got a distribution deal from friends that we met through
the Man International Film Festival and the Melmo Arab from Festival,
and they were supported from the beginning. So I trusted
(21:46):
them that they'll do their best, and they did. They
put it up on the largest local streaming platform, and
now Watermelon Pictures has done the same for us in
North America. Thank god.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Well, let's address the elephant in the room, which is
that the people were nervous probably distributing a movie that
touches on the Middle East conflict in any way. Right,
it's a third rail.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
I completely understand that. I just worked so hard on
making this film apolitical. We don't talk about why the
NDI thought is happening. We don't mention Israel in depth.
There are no normative statements happening about the occupation. You're
simply living with a family going through a war zone,
and it's like even that you're Scared to Touch were
(22:28):
released in March twenty twenty three and Warren Gaza started
and it started getting a lot more interest from festivals
all over the world. Listen, maybe my film's not that good, fine, right,
but no other land just want an Oscar and they
don't have a distribution company. That's insane.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It depresses me the way that this topic, in any
form of journalism people worry about touching it in any way.
The preconceptions, the loadedness of it scares people, and I
understand why. But it also this makes me, from a
journalist's perspective, that there's stories that are probably going unheard
(23:05):
or untold or undistributed because of people's fear. And yeah,
I mean to your point, I would never say this
is a political movie. It's a movie about a family
and what life is really like in these situations, which
to me again is the most astonishing part of it.
We're so used to be bombarded with images of the
worst atrocities that one can imagine on social media, and
(23:30):
for me, one effect is that it flattens my thinking
about what's happening in Palestine to pure destruction, which, of
course on one level it is, but there's also a
fact in which life does have to carry on. People
still have to exist in some way, and we never
get to see that those aren't the images that we see.
(23:51):
And that's what I found so moving about it. Families
still have to exist, they have to move around, and
they have to be families.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Agree, And I think as important as it is that
these images that we're seeing that are coming out of
these places, because I do think that with the over
influx of photos and videos that are coming out of
places like us, and the limitations or the fears that
we were just speaking about in journalism circles and documentary
(24:20):
circles and film circles is slowly dwindling because at some
point you have to face the elephant in the room,
right like when the elephant is that big. But it
does kind of desensitize us a little bit and makes
it hard to continue watching because it's not even possible
to process five second clip of someone picking up pieces
of their baby. I'm sorry, but I know this from
(24:42):
deep within my heart that the film's coming out of
the Gazen people, where whatever their future looks like in
the next five ten years are going to be a
killing And I really hope that by then the world
is ready to watch them and to support them and
to distribute them.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
I suspect they will. What I I hope that people
would get out of a movie like yours is you know,
you can understand through one family's experience, and it doesn't
have to be like a pure catastrophe. It doesn't have
to be the kind of images that we get bombarded
with on TV. Now you can feel how the enormity
(25:18):
of a conflict in a much more subtle way, which
is what makes the movie so successful.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
To me, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
I want to ask you a little bit about the
film festival's circuit and the kind of reactions you've got.
You were all over the world, right, you probably don't know,
but how many festivals and screenings do you think you had?
Speaker 3 (25:37):
More than I could count and in countries all over
the world. I mean, the one that was a smack
to the face was the DMZ Film Festival between North
Korea and South Korea. There's a city there on the
border and my film was playing there, And how the
did my film get all the way there?
Speaker 2 (25:55):
You know?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, No, I've been so grateful for the film of
all life that my film had.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Had Did people see the movie and the way that
you thought they would see the movie? In other words,
this is so personal and you have so much wrapped
up in it, and you created it. When people were
watching it and asking you questions or commenting on it,
were there surprises and how they saw it? Or was
it what you expected?
Speaker 3 (26:20):
The surprises came when I noticed people were seeing beyond
basic questions. The usuals are how I came to make
this film and how I felt making the film, why
my mom was filming in questions about my mom, and
then my sister is freaking out the most, how is she?
When I got questions that where people saw beyond that
(26:41):
was where I really felt like, oh wow, I don't
know who you are. You live in a country halfway
across the world, and you're seeing that which I intended
for people to see. Little things about my dad, for example,
like my dad reading Harry Potter to us and kind
of his role and most people don't catch that right,
but few fathers out there did because they were paying
(27:02):
closer attention to what my dad was doing. But what
surprised me the most was I did not receive a
single negative comment or any type of passive, aggressive or
anything that was just pure love and support, especially in
North America. A True False Film festival was where it
really hit me. It's like a college town, like an
(27:25):
hour's drive from Saint Louis, I mean, Jesus country, right
like Billboard's saying, Jesus will save you and call this
number and Jesus will answer, and you know the Trump flags.
Not only did everyone there know who I was, which
felt really weird because it was a very small, intimate festival,
but they were all so supportive, and all these old
(27:48):
white Americans who were like locals from Missouri coming and
having in depth conversations with me about it and clearly
very propousity, various empathetic to me. That was mind chattering.
They did have a security detail for me at that
festival because they were getting some threats, but if they
hadn't told me, I wouldn't have noticed.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
You've made a massively successful documentary. You're back in Palestine.
Are you making something now? Are you working on a
new documentary or was this a one thing you just
wanted to try it and now you're going to go
back to your day job.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
I've been focusing on my day job since we released
the film more than anything, and I don't think it's
the end of my storytelling career. I don't know how
I feel about filmmaking again. I'm definitely open to using
that medium. I have more stories to tell. I have
my grandparents' stories to tell as well that they've archived
and they've written in places, and I'd love to find
(28:48):
ways to share them in the future. But I don't
like to depend on the creative process for my income.
Let's put it that way. When it becomes a need
for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.
And I feel that way about everything really. But the
last few years I've been focusing on the startup here
of a consulting company and a nonprofit like think tank.
(29:09):
Me and my partner is locally. A lot of work
has been putting into that. You know, we're really trying
to give back to the community and to build a
progressive base for Palestinian news, to empower them and hopefully
see change in the future. But with the current situation,
it's hard to tell what tomorrow holds. I know for
a fact I'll be back to storytelling, though sooner or later.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yes, do you think of three promises as a political movie.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Not at all. Like I said, it's a film about
a family living in a war zone, and it just
so happens to be a Palestinian family living in Palestine
under Israeli occupation. That's facts, it's not politics.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I asked, because I am so curious about the fate
of storytelling that feels at all political in this day
and age. So a little bit of what I was
talking about earlier, where anything that even touches on something
that can say that are third rail gets judged before
it comes out. This is true not just of the
(30:06):
conflict in Palestine. It's true of American politics when it
comes to Trump with domestic terrorism. You know, it's like
there's certain topics that are very hard to reach people with.
You can make it, but will people actually consume it.
So I wonder if you have suggestions or thoughts when
somebody is telling a story like the one that you did,
(30:28):
that some people are going to view one way or
another as political, how do you get them to still
pay attention.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Keep it row if it's coming from a place where
you're not virtue signaling, You're just like, this is how
it is. It's from an emotional place. It is from
the deepest places in my heart. Looked at this film
from a pure, innocent child's perspective. Don't add anything. There's
no need to send signals that occupation is bad, or
(30:56):
that Israel is mean, or that Palestinians have the right
to resist or whatever. This is simply a story of
humans living in a human created problem and they're dealing
with it, and the world needs to see it for
what it is. Let the audience decide what their politics are.
If they see your film and become more extremist, then
(31:17):
it's probably a problem with them, and no matter what
messaging you put into your film, that's not going to
change their thoughts. I think the most powerful thing we
have as humans is our ability to share our emotions
with each other, and that's what makes us social animals,
and so it makes us who we are.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
So ironic about that is that when you do let
people decide, the effect is often more emotionally strong, like
you're able to reach more people if you don't try
to make up their minds for them.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
It's a truly beautiful film. I hope you are so
proud about it, and you said thank you so much
for doing this.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Thank you, Matt, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Three Promises is now available to stream in North America.
You can find out on Apple TV in Prime Video
by searching three Promises. Origin Stories is a production of
Campside Media, hosted by me Matthew Cher and produced by
abacar Adn. This episode was sound designed by Garrett Tiedeman,
(32:19):
theme music by Doug Slawan. Our studio engineer is Jimmy
Guthrie at Arcade one sixty Studios. Special thanks to Michael
Kenyon Mayer at Campside and Chris McLeod at Blue Elevator
Productions
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