ABSTRACT
“Nowadays I film people being shot, then being taken to hospital. I record their moment of death, and then I film their mothers mourning. I also film in the graveyards while families bury their loved ones”. These are the words of the cameraman Abdul Salam Shihada at the start of Azza El-Hassan’s film Newstime (2002). 2 In that film, which was shot in Ramallah during the first months of the al-Aqsa Intifada (Autumn 2000), El-Hassan wanted to challenge what she calls “Newstime”—the understanding within the global imaginary that Palestinians are always living in a state of disaster. Her plan was to make a film that focused on the everyday lives of people in her neighbourhood—the loving twenty-five-year marriage of the couple from whom she rented her apartment and the everyday stories of four boys that roamed her street. What she found, however, as the narratives she wanted to follow fell apart during the violence of the al-Aqsa Intifada, was that she, too, was incapable of producing images free of the disaster Palestinians were facing at that time. Umm and Abu Khalil fled Ramallah to escape the mounting violence. The boys gave her disturbing quotes suggesting that they had no dreams for the future. When she asked them whether she could film them again in five years, one of them answered ominously, “If we are still alive”.
