arna's children

A few weeks ago I attended a memorial service for Rachel Corrie at the Riverside Church. At one point, some short filmed segments of various people reading her words were shown, and then a caption came onto the screen, noting that "children from the Freedom Theater in Jenin" were supposed to participate via satellite, but due to Israeli military closure were unable to do so. For some reason the mention of the Freedom Theater rang a bell, but I didn't remember why until a week later, when K. called me up and asked if I'd like to come with her and two friends to a screening of the documentary Arna's Children, held at the NYU Cantor center and sponsored by the Brooklyn-based Middle Eastern arts organization ArteEast and local chapters of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. We were particularly lucky because Juliano Mer-Khamis, the co-director of the film and the son of its subject, Arna Mer-Khamis, was present--his discussion afterwards added a lot of depth and context to this wrenching, unsettling film.

Arna's Children opens with that now-familiar scene, a checkpoint on a dusty hill in the West Bank: Israeli soldiers, Palestinians in cars, ID cards and protests. The camera finds its way to a small crone of a woman, her head swathed in a black-and-white keffiyeh, a protest sign in her hands, as she yells and whistles, alternately berating the soldiers in Hebrew and yelling encouragement to the stalled drivers in Arabic, grinning as they honk their horns in response. This, Juliano's voice-over tells us, is his mother Arna. She wears the keffiyeh not just as a political symbol, but to cover a head bald from chemotherapy: she has terminal cancer.

Arna Mer was the daughter of a Zionist settler and kibbutznik; as a teen she was a member of the Palmach, the Jewish paramilitary force that fought to create the state of Israel. After 1948, she became involved with the Israeli Communist Party, and married one of its leaders--a Palestinian, Saliba Khamis. She devoted much of the remainder of her life to the Palestinian people, particularly to providing educational and artistic opportunities to children in the West bank's refugee camps. When she won the Alternative Nobel Prize in the 80's, she used the money to found a children's theater in Jenin--the Freedom Theater--and her son Juliano, an actor, came to help teach the children. He started filming the children--in drama class, in the streets, on stage performing a play by Ghassan Kanafani--and recorded them from the late 1980s until 1996, shortly after his mother's death, partly with the intention of making a film about her life. That film was never finished--but after the start of the second intifada, Mer-Khamis went back to the camp to find his students--"Arna's children"--and learn what had become of them in the aftermath of the 2002 re-occupation of the West Bank and the battle of Jenin.

Interweaving the footage from the early days of the theater, Arna's last years of life and her death, and the ongoing fighting in Jenin in 2002, Arna's Children traces the stories of several young boys from the Jenin camp: Ashraf, the clown, a talented young actor, the quieter Alaa, whom we first see sitting on the rubble of his family's house after it's destruction by the military, and Youssef, Ashraf's best friend, the most sentimental of the three. By the end of the film, all three are dead--Ashraf in a firefight with Israeli troops, Alaa, who has become an Al-Aqsa brigade commander, in a targeted assassination, and Youssef-who joked once to an Israeli cameraman that his name was Yossi, who wanted to attend acting school in Tel Aviv--in a suicide attack in Hadera. Only one of the children is still alive; a stonemason, he has carved the gravestones of most of his childhood friends.

Arna's Children is both a requiem to Mer-Khamis herself and the children of the theater, and a fragmentary attempt to illuminate the reason the children took these paths. On the latter account, its scattershot nature (missing years, pieced-together footage) can be frustrating--we're left with so many questions about what happened to the boys and their families in the intervening years. (Hence the great value of Juliano Mer-Khamis's prescence at the screening--he told many parts of the story that didn't make it onto the screen.) But still, what did is compelling, both as documentary cinema and political indictment of the impact of military occupation on children. There's some especially remarkable footage of Palestinian militants in the Jenin camp during the ongoing battles with the IDF. Alaa allowed his old friend and teacher 'Juli' film him and his small group of fighters as they ate, slept, prepared their weapons, planted explosives, played cat-and-mouse with tanks, mourned the dead--it's an extremely unusual glimpse into the lives of people usually only encountered through anonymous, distant media reports--"five Palestinian militants killed in the West Bank," etc. I doubt there's any way most 'outside' observers could have gotten access to film such scenes--only because Mer-Khamis, though a half-Jewish Israeli, was not actually percieved as an outsider could he do so.

And that's the great strength of the film, and the source of many of its most interesting moments--Mer-Khamis's own liminal position, and Arna's--they are accepted wholeheartedly by the Jenin community, yet also clearly identified as initially-suspect members of the occupying society. Despite the bleakness of the children's fates, in several striking scenes (particularly a conversation between a teenaged Ashraf, in front of the camera, and Juliano, behind it) it's clear that Arna and her children achieved a genuine breaking-down of boundaries, a shift in the meaning of these categories. At its best, by refusing to shy away from the complexity of the stories it tells, Arna's Children manages to do the same.

(see here for the official site and a biography of Arna; also, Lawrence of Cyberia has a detailed account of what happened to each of children in the film)