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Back to Syria?

The stories I have heard from my friends in Syria sound uncomfortably similar to what I have been witnessing in the Yemen, right down to the plain-clothed security men firing from the roof tops into crowds of innocent people.

Last night I drank Arak with my friend in Syria over Skype – he told me he has offered his chest to the cause and will go again to the city of Homs to protest after Friday prayers.

He bitches with me about the mutual friends we have in Syria who have done nothing for the cause. One friend who likes to be known as a journalist whose home-town was witness to a great massacre a couple of days ago has said nothing or written nothing – but I am not sure you can blame people for this, in Syria it is difficult to comprehend the amount of fear that is instilled in people there, to me this highlights the bravery and determination of the brothers and sisters who do offer themselves on the front line.

But something has definitely changed – only a few months ago people were too afraid to gather in even the smallest groups to complain about something, whereas now, people feel emboldened enough to gather in their hundreds and thousands to protest against the government. Fear has somehow lost its grip.

What about the comments I read that the Syrian revolution is spearheaded by the feared Muslim brothers who are waiting to take over and bring Sharia law to Syria? “Bullshit” my friend says, “Of course they are there but the people behind this revolution are ordinary folk sick of corruption lies and bullshit from this government, no jobs no money or hope has been a life for the majority. That is what it is about”.

With the help of technology and the internet the Syrian government has nowhere to hide from its crimes… “They behave worse than Israelis” a friend says, another friend interrupts, adding that “They always behaved this way in Beirut”. Is it the heavy handed government reaction to the protests that is finally turning the people against this once popular president, making the protests even bigger than they would have been had has Assad treated them with respect, or is the genie out of the bottle in Syria?

Personally I feel a sense of excitement and trepidation for the whole region, but I do have admit there is a nagging fear for the future of Syria, and wonder if the only hope they had for reform in the supposed gentle image of Basher has now been dashed following the slaughter of 100 demonstrators in one day and whether this pivotal nation in the middle east is about to shed more blood than we have seen across the whole Arab spring so far.

We are told that the dangers caused by Syria collapsing (Israel especially is fearful) don’t bear thinking about, but now as the people of Syria face a crucial week I fear (on a humanitarian level) we must contemplate the worst.

I am in the process of trying to get back in to Syria in order to finish my film about the revolution there. Luckily I had applied for a visa weeks ago after my front tooth fell out as a result, I believe, of the stress I was under following the massacre I witnessed in Change Square.

In London I discovered it would cost £450 to replace the tooth but knew that £300 would get me to Syria and that £80 would see me right with dentist Rima and I’d still have money left over for a few nights in a cut-price Damascus hotel (part of their new failing 12 billion dollar tourist industry) – So if all goes well I will be off to catch up on the Syrian revolution for myself next Thursday.

Wish me luck. Xx

Return to Yemen

As I prepare to return to Yemen tomorrow i try to bear in mind that I explore politics through people and try take an audience into a complex political world outside of their own familiar backyard by finding attractive articulate characters.

As always, my mates back in Hull being my target audience. Taking them to a place like the Republic of Yemen appears a lot harder than my previous films – Iraq, Palestine, Japan, Hull, seemed so easy, they had at least heard of these places, but the Yemen, where exactly is that?

To me my films are all are like children, taking so many years to find, source, film and edit… in their own way they become a very personal exploration of myself as manifested through others.

I had originally wanted to make more overtly propagandist films in the naive belief that I could change the world just so long as I shouted loud enough, but thanks to my ‘FREE’ National Film and Television School education I was soon able to discover a more subtle honest film style, one that would actually engage with the audience rather than just shout at them – I found that allowing people to tell us of their lives and their struggles, their victories and their losses, was a far more respectful (to the character and to the viewer) way of discussing political ideas than any simplistic one-dimensional tub-thumping.

To quote an old school-friend “I find the worlds biggest scuzzbuckets and make ‘Human Stories’ about them”, I see them more as people fighting against the odds, people who haven’t been completely beaten down by the system, whose lives seem to consist of one battle after another… And, as we know, television likes a ‘Bad-Boy’, especially one that is in touch with his feminine side, and if he is also in love, and is able to talk openly about his life then all the better, no matter how extreme or radical his views.

I feel my new guy in Yemen fits this criteria, he is a breath of fresh air, at least to me he is, in this highly uniform traditional society he certainly stands out and give me oxygen even if he does get scared at the mass demonstrations (the armed forces have opened fire on some of them), though I feel his fear is for me not for himself.

On my return to the hotel room I see news reports saying that Yemen has been put on the high alert dangerous places to visit list by our government – along with Libya, Somalia and Ivory Coast. Maybe if (like Cameron in Egypt last month) I was here with a gaggle of British arms traders the UK Foreign Office wouldn’t be quite so concerned.

Sandstorms and Julie Burchill on my mind

The crippling heat saps my energy as we rumble and judder on and on packed like sardines inside this tin-can on wheels. The sweat drips like blood out of a wound from my brow and slides down my soaked back, outside the Syrian desert heat soars to 47c whilst inside the air conditioning repeatedly refuses to work.

Fearing that I may pass-out from the insane heat I decide to sleep.

I wake in a hot sweat with Julie Burchill on my mind. What happened to the idyllic desert landscape? We are now driving through a sand storm. Visibility is nil yet still the driver hammers on as the whirling sand batters the bus.

Julie Burchill is like a bad dream in a sandstorm, I’d accidentally seen her ‘talk’ promoting a book at the Latitude festival last month in the UK. “How do you operate in a middle class world as a working class woman?” “How do you find your way?” “Are you ever truly accepted?” Burchill is asked.

At first I felt for her. I sometimes wonder if the working classes are ever really accepted into the private club of the middle class world or whether they just allow a few of us in because they know we’ll drink too much and keep them entertained with our common ways for a while. Do they laugh with us, or at us?

Oh dear, am I being too classist? Well to be honest if it wasn’t for the interviewer focussing on the class issue I wouldn’t have raised it, but I guess I’m also sensitive to the fact that I often find myself being asked how a mere pea factory worker ended up in TV rubbing shoulders with the bespectacled Oxbridge brigade?

Don’t get me wrong, I like my middle class friends because they are usually intelligent and in their own way they amuse me, although I still keep a tight bunch of working class mates who are my closest friends for their endless ability to mock themselves and life itself in a funny and intelligent way.

But I sometimes wonder if when the token working class ‘icon’ is paraded in some middle class setting like the ‘writers tent’ at the Latitude festival (or myself at film festival Q&A’s) whether it forces them into becoming a parody of the person these people want us to be like, so instead of being articulate and interesting we start shouting and swearing. Is this a result of our own insecurity?

It wasn’t long before Burchill was swearing ‘fuck fuck fuck’ to shock the middle class audience; like a tiger cornered in her cage. I was on her side at first but when she made some reactionary ignorant remark defending the war on Iraq and attacking those who opposed it I reckon she had gone too far.

15 years of hanging out in the Groucho club was the reason she left London, apparently she’d realised that the only people she knew were media types – it certainly explains her ignorance when it comes to her opinions on the Iraq war. Maybe she should restrict herself to the jade goody shagging gutter gossip stuff that got her rich and famous in the first place.

By the end of her ‘talk’ she’d completely lost the sympathy of the audience, and, more importantly for me, she had become an embarrassment to her ‘own’ class, doing nothing but re-enforcing the most negative stereotypes of us as ignorant foul-mouthed inarticulate fools.

Fortunately the Syrian sand storm woke me from this nightmare and still, with zero visibility outside of this tin-can, my attention swiftly turned away from Julie Burchill and back to my own personal safety as we rock and rolled our way through the stormy sandy desert. There are no Julie Burchill’s in Arabia thank god.

The link

Roula said she left her apartment to walk to the university in the busy capital Cairo and was stopped by a guy in plain clothes demanding to see her identity card, he said he was police but how was she to know? He told her to follow him down a quiet street, she said she wasn’t going anywhere with him, he held her for as long as he could on spurious charges.

Roula is on a university course in Cairo, I am trying to make a film in Syria, she sent me a Facebook link that I cannot open (is it blocked by Syria?). She watched some Egyptian police beat a man to death – more than just kill him she said, they took pleasure in watching his head break open as they bashed it against a wall.

Roula is Syrian – leaving the “safety” of Syria she feels that she is in a dangerous lawless land – I guess it’s the kind of thing you might see in America, but she is in Egypt – Many people (usually of Arabic decent) complain about the behaviour of the secret police in Egypt and how they are the most heavy handed in the region.

I haven’t in all my time in Syria been stopped by the secret police or even seen them, they operate in a different way here. I remember being tailed endlessly in Iraq during the Saddam days, which I quite enjoyed, it was like a game of cat and mouse.

It’s only Television

Before I returned to England a couple of weeks ago I made a trip to meet with someone whom I hoped would be an interesting character for a film I wanted to make. I didn’t mention anything about him in my blog because I wasn’t sure. When can we ever be sure for sure?

A few hours before I was due to leave I took a rental car into the Syrian countryside and went to meet him, and managed to film a little taster-piece for the BBC. I hadn’t got around to telling them that my previous film with Nizam had fallen through, I was worried that they may see me as being rather unreliable over these last few unproductive years.

How the years pass. It seems such a long ago since I finished the Japan film; and everything since then… it all feels like a series of failures.

Failed projects in South Africa that the BBC didn’t want, films the BBC did want in Dubai that I didn’t want to do but still gave (virtually unfunded) the best part of a year to trying to make work followed by a year and a half finding, and eventually failing to make, a film in Norway and Syria with Nizam.

I remember NHK my Japanese co-broadcaster offering me 100k for an idea I’d written about Damascus. But the BBC said they wanted Dubai. In my niceness I tried to persuade NHK to put their money to a more worthy cause – a far more popular film set in Dubai for (and backed by) the BBC.

And so I went to Dubai and over two trips lasting a few months found myself dying inside. Lost and without direction, the evenings became nothing more than a series of blurred bar scenes, I wanted to lose all my sensibilities and completely withdraw from that plastic nightmare hell-hole.

So I found myself migrating from Dubai to Damascus to meet with Nizam again; which began yet another mistaken adventure. But by this time the BBC had begun to show some interest in Libya, and, as Nizam was half-Libyan, his story would fit the bill. In the end they commissioned a story half-set in Syria and Libya. But a year and a half had passed since I’d tried to persuade the Japanese away from Damascus towards Dubai and now here I was again trying to persuade them (NHK) away from Dubai and back to Syria with a little bit of Libya thrown in too.

Two years after their original 100k offer we meet at the prestigious Yamagata Film festival where my Japan film picks up two awards. I sense awkwardness in the NHK Commissioning Editor, something had changed and I wasn’t sure what, and in true (non-confrontational) Japanese spirit nothing is said. He takes my Nizam trailer and promises to submit it, 6 months later he finally submits it but by now rumours emerge that he is being moved to a new department and my project with Nizam is falling through. Could it be that I spent too much time fund-raising and not enough time filming?

And so it was, in the final hours of my time in Syria that I found myself making an impromptu trip into the Syrian countryside to find a new character. The BBC like him but they can only offer a small budget to make it and suggest NHK to co-fund it.

But it is now 2 and a half years on since their offer of 100k for a film in Damascus – money I couldn’t accept because the BBC wanted a film in Dubai – and things have changed, my man at NHK has moved departments and it seems the money is no longer there.

The motto of the story is never refuse money from TV!! Lie and cheat and tell them whatever it is they want to hear but never never ever refuse their offer of money, because, in TV, as with life, you never know what tomorrow will bring.