transcript

Gaza Sderot - Life in Spite of Everything

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LISA: Some following the developments in Gaza and Israel may feel a depressing sense of deja vu, but as The World's Carol Zall reports, there's an international film project that's trying to get beyond that.
CAROL: So you've heard it all before. Violence in Israel and Gaza. Civilians dead. Kasam rockets in Southern Israeli towns. And somehow, despite the horror of it all, you manage to tune it out. You hear the words, but it's just not real.
SERGE: There's this feeling that there is some kind of fatigue in the audience about the Middle East, that it's always the same unhappy story. It's always the same unhappy ending. And in a way, people turn it off.
CAROL: Serge Gordey is the Executive Producer of a documentary web project called “Gaza Sderot – Life In Spite of Everything.” The project, from the French/German TV channel ARTE, is aimed at changing that Middle East fatigue. Starting in October, film crews began following a few individuals in Gaza and in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. The crews posted a two-minute video from each side of the border, every day for two months. The project ended December 23rd, coincidentally just before the Israeli incursion began.
SERGE: It's a bit depressing to think that we spent a year showing that, you know, life goes on, and the day that we finished the war broke out.
CAROL: Arik Bernstein is an Israeli producer on the project. One of the characters his team followed was 31-year-old singer-songwriter Avi Vaknin. The very first video from the Israeli side begins with a shot of the door to the bomb shelter, and then you see a rock band playing inside. Avi Vaknin begins to sing.
AVI: [SPEAKING IN HEBREW]
CAROL: There was a rocket alarm, he says. A Kazam fell right next to us, maybe 100 meters. And then someone just stood there, opened his hands like this, and then looked at the sky and said, “ Why? Why me? Why me?” Vaknin says he went back home, got his guitar, and wrote a song in 15 minutes. “Sderot is a classic place for lyrics,” he says. “You have all the cruelest suffering in the world to write songs about.”
The video from Gaza that same day also featured a musician. Khalaf Qassim, a Gaza man in his 40s, is on a horse-drawn cart with some other musicians. You can see the ocean to the left as the horse clip-clops along a dusty road.
KHALAF: [SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
CAROL: “We have a wedding today,” Khalaf says, “But there's no gas so we have to take the horse. There's no other choice,” he says. “We must celebrate the wedding.”
The Gaza Sderot video project lets you be a fly on the wall for the intimate and mundane moments of people's lives, and Arik Bernstein says people from both communities have been watching.
ARIK: It's really, I think, the first time ever that people from Sderot and Israel and people from Gaza and Palestine can see one another daily, online. Not news, not politicians, not army people, just normal people trying to get on with their lives.
CAROL: Executive Producer Serge Gordey says that the power of these films is that they remind you that people in conflict zones are really just like everyone else.
SERGE: When you realize that people have the same issues about work or about love, about raising your kids, in places where you don't first think in these terms, well then I get the feeling that we're doing good work. And that happened quite a few times.
CAROL: And it may happen a few more times. The producers would like to start filming again as soon as possible, but they're not sure when the Gaza team can do that. People are taking shelter. Some are trying to leave the city. Phones aren't working. I tried to talk to one of the Gaza producers for this story but just couldn't get through. Still, Israeli producer Arik Bernstein says hopes that soon, you'll be able to tune into the Gaza Sderot website for more from the lives of the ordinary Gazans and Israelis, two minutes at a time.
For The World, I'm Carol Zall.
LISA: You can find a link to the Sderot Gaza website at theworld.org

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