Then they said: Refugee is a timely documentary expertly produced by two Oxford students, Persis Love and Jake Boswall, about how Palestinian artists are responding to the conflict with Isarel. The film centres on an interview with Fadi Ramadan, a refugee living in the Deheishe camp near Bethlehem who runs an amateur dramatics society for the local children. Through his interview and interviews with other local artists and dramatists, this documentary asks a question which in the West we have all had to consider in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks: can art be a form of resistance to violence?
Our media is much more interested in, and much more horrified by, violent actions intended to disturb the status quo, such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and last week’s horrifying sequel to them, than it is in violence enacted to maintain the status quo. This is part of the reason why Then they said: Refugee is such an important film. Its viewers cannot help but be shocked by the amount of violence Israeli soldiers have subjected Fadi and his community to, just to maintain the original injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. “My brother was a prisoner”, he tells us, “and my mother was shot […] there is a checkpoint in the road where, at any time, I can be arrested.”
The most recent blow to Fadi’s community was the killing of his friend Jihad al-Jafari, who was shot only three weeks ago by Israeli soldiers. “They wanted someone”, Fadi says, “they started shooting bombs, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Then suddenly they began shooting real bullets […] later they wouldn’t allow the ambulance to come.”
The documentary covers two efforts to commemorate Jihad al-Jafari, one by Fadi and one by an artist, called Ahmed Hmeedat. Ahmed paints murals in the streets of the refugee camp which, Fadi says, “show our daily suffering”, and has painted one of al-Jafari. Ahmed describes his paintings as “a means of struggle, like art, painting, theatre or music.”
It is a very intelligent decision by the film makers not to add their own commentary, because it means that no final judgement is given on the question the documentary implicitly asks, which is whether Ahmed and Fadi’s hope that art can be politically useful is grounded in reality. Thus we, the viewers, are made to share their uncertainty about this very point.
At the same time, the film makers make very clear that in Fadi and Ahmed’s community many people have a more bellicose idea of how to enact change. At a commemorative event for al-Jafari, young men chant “Mother of the martyr, lucky you / I wish it was my mother instead of you.” This puts the viewer in a rather uneasy position, making them aware that it is not only the Israeli soldiers who are eager and willing to inflict pain on the opposite side. But this sense of unease is a mark of the documentary’s success; it is a reminder of just how fraught and how complicated Israeli-Palestinian relations are.
