ABSTRACT
At about 7 am on Saturday, 28 February 2004, I was sitting in the lobby of the Christmas Hotel in East Jerusalem drinking coffee and waiting. I was in Jerusalem to help launch a Palestinian film festival, ‘Dreams of a Nation’, that Annemarie Jacir (a Palestinian film-maker) and I had organised in collaboration with Yabous, a Palestinian performing arts centre that had agreed to host our festival. During the opening night of the festival, which we had to hold at a makeshift theatre at the YMCA in East Jerusalem – for there was no alternative – Hany Abu-Assad had suddenly showed up, much to my delight and surprise.
