Memory, too, is part of Palestinian resistance. Memories of stolen land, of the horrors they have survived, and of martyrs who once lived are an intimate part of Palestinians’ lives. Ross Domoney—who’s produced a series of films on the West Bank for TRNN—has teamed up with Urban geographer Antonis Vradis. The duo, who produce films for Shadowgraph media are now embarking on a new project to document memory in the Palestinian resistance. Domoney and Vradis speak about their new project and what led them to it.
Additional links/info:
- Help make Palestine Remembers a reality by donating to the crowdfunding campaign
- ‘Like a mini Gaza’: IDF raid on Nur Shams causes worst West Bank destruction in decades
- On the ground in Jenin with the West Bank’s resistance fighters
- Shadowgraph YouTube page
Produced by Ross Domoney, Nadia Péridot, and Antonis Vradis
Filmed and edited by Ross Domoney
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Ross Domoney:
Hello. I’m Ross Domoney. I’m a freelance video journalist and documentary maker.
Antonis Vradis:
I am Antonis Vradis. I’m an academic geographer.
Ross Domoney:
As a filmmaker, I freelance for The Real News Network, making reports from the UK and Palestine. Over the last year, the reports made by my small team have gained millions of views on YouTube.
Aside from my freelance work with The Real News, Antonis and I have collaborated on independent projects for over a decade. Yeah, we’ve worked together a fair few times on projects as academic filmmaker duo.
Antonis Vradis:
We really have.
Ross Domoney:
Recently, we were in the West Bank of Palestine, and we got caught up in the most destructive Israeli army raid since the second intifada. Let’s show you a clip.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS] Narrator: Moments later, the resistance fighters set off the air raid alarm. The much anticipated raid on Nur Shams has begun. Those who can flee for their lives.
Ross Domoney:
So why are we making this video here today? Because as the Israeli war machine’s destruction continues, we have embarked on an independent film project to capture Palestinian memory as a form of resistance. We need your help to tell this story. Check out our trailer.
[VIDEO TRAILER PLAYS]
Ross Domoney:
We made some lifelong friends in Palestine and shared some tough nights together. Now, we need to raise money to cover the post-production costs of our independent film so that we can start the editing.
Antonis Vradis:
Maybe it would be nice to give some background to this wider project because the trip that we just made to Palestine, which we’ll get to in a moment, the way we envisioned it, is part of something much bigger.
Ross Domoney:
Yeah, we come back and forward with it, but Antonis and I were always very interested in filming political struggles all over the world. We started off when we were a bit younger, of course, being super into riots and uprisings.
But then, in a way, I think we found that that that film language was a little bit restricting. We were doing video journalism work related to these political struggles, but we wanted to find the language that was more otherworldly so you would understand the politics of cities in conflicts and political turmoil, but we wanted to find a new filmmaking language.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
Antonis Vradis:
We were inspired by dreams. I think I remember telling you I had read an article. Someone had tried something similar many years ago, and we realized, I think, that a lot of the messages that we wanted to convey, or that more conventional documentary would convey, or even a political film, it is possible to get this sense, this feeling, and also this political message much more through the language of dreams.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
Antonis Vradis:
It can reveal so much about your individual state of being, of course, but much more so than, I think, the collective one. Right?
Ross Domoney:
Totally. And then we hit it also with a geographer’s approach, didn’t we? We said, how can we confine this to one space? We decided we’d stick to subway trains, underground trains, metro systems, and then we just asked commuters again and again and again: What did you dream about in your sleep?
Antonis Vradis:
This brings us to the last few years, where it feels like the world is going more and more into an intense direction socially, politically, psychologically, and there’s more and more events. We started with Trump’s inauguration, as you said, and then we realized that they keep happening. The next one on was Ukraine, where we decided to go pretty much as soon as the war broke out, really.
Ross Domoney:
The full-scale invasion. Yeah.
Antonis Vradis:
The full-scale invasion.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS] Narrator: The lights have been turned off so this station cannot be seen by Russian bombers. Police are on the hunt for saboteurs. Ukrainians travel above and underground by train as Russia tries to occupy their country.
Antonis Vradis:
Yeah, it’s very difficult to untangle it, but, exactly, fast forward to Oct. 7, and I think probably the moment happened — And I do remember reading about it as it was developing as a story. I think probably a lot of us were in a similar situation.
It became apparent quite early on that this was very big, that this was going to be a huge, like the backlash that was going to take place would be enormous. I remember getting messages from friends and family saying, hope you’re not planning on going, but I think, deep inside, we were already. I was already thinking that there has to be a way to go out there.
With Palestine and with everything that’s been happening since with this terrible, unfathomable genocide, it felt like the stakes were so much higher for me at least, and I think we share that sentiment that it was so important to try and go there and do justice to the people, to the struggle, to what’s happening, to what they’re going through. In a way, maybe at least I felt that for a while, and I had cold feet about it not because I didn’t want to go, but because I wanted to so much.
Ross Domoney:
Yeah, I felt that huge pressure as well and sensitivity and acceptance as well that, of course, me and Antonis were outsiders and were not Palestinian, and we totally accept that position, but we still wanted to go in and use our skills in the best way possible to tell a film that would hopefully be different and related to what we’ve focused on in the past with these subconscious worlds, and then it changed. Subconscious merged into things about memory as well with Palestine.
Antonis Vradis:
Well, there was a very practical problem that we haven’t really discussed much. There’s no trains in Palestine, so it would have been difficult to continue on that same thread. I don’t think it ever came up in the conversations, but it’s true. The one vehicle that you’ve got literally and metaphorically to tell the story, you don’t have it. There were other elements that we needed to think as means of connecting these threads. Through the discussions, through the readings that we did, of course, memory is something that came up again and again.
Ross Domoney:
I guess this came from experience that we decided to still try as much as possible and focus on space and territory. We accepted that we didn’t have this train system as a go-to film method with dreams, so then we decided that we’d stay in an area. There was loads of coverage on Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank which has a really strong armed Palestinian resistance, but then there was also stuff going on in Tulkarm refugee camp and Nur Shams, which is right next to Tulkarm refugee camp, which we felt was a little bit more under-reported. We decided that we’d go stay in a hotel that was in between the two camps. We had Tulkarm camp. Was it 200 meters to our left?
Antonis Vradis:
Yeah.
Ross Domoney:
A little bit further.
Antonis Vradis:
Yeah, a little bit further. Yeah.
Ross Domoney:
And then Nur Shams was really close, 50, 100 meters to our right of the hotel. We wanted to go with this memory concept, right?
Antonis Vradis:
One of the original ideas was that we would try to find either survivors of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, direct survivors, people who were there, obviously, children. They could only have been children back then if they’re still alive today, or their descendants, family who have grandparents and parents who would’ve had, so either direct or indirect experience and memories of the Nakba. We wanted to record them to capture these memories and to try and somehow integrate them into a documentary, also filming what these places look like today because, geographically, they’re still there, as in they are spots on the map. The places that they talk about physically would still be the same location that you can trace. In terms of the landscape, we imagined, we expected, and we’re not wrong, that in most cases it would be completely different. It would have turned into a part of a Israeli state, so yeah.
Ross Domoney:
Yeah, and it’s quite, to use those words that you’re not really allowed to use in Pakistan, you say complicated, but I guess we have to explain the bigger context as well. These camps like Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams where we were filming, they were camps set up by Palestinian refugees who were refugees from the Nakba in 1948, so the native Palestinians who were forced to flee their lands when the Zionist militias created what is today known as the state of Israel. They’re refugees in their own land, and then they built up their own structures, didn’t they?
Antonis Vradis:
They really are part of the urban fabric. It’s quite interesting in that they’re still called refugee camps and people will call them the 1948 camps. Even in the name, the memory of the event is there in the everyday life of these camps. Even though they’re called camps, they’re not informal or temporary in terms of structures. As you’re saying, they are bricks and mortar. They’re built in the same way as the rest of the city. They’re denser, absolutely. They’re some of the most densely populated places on earth really, incredibly dense, super narrow streets and alleyways.
Ross Domoney:
Amongst these dense camps, there’s a huge amount of solidarity between Palestinian residents, and there’s also armed Palestinian groups that have had quite a new presence. I think it was Ahmad, the guy that helped us out a lot in Palestine, who was saying that it’s a new phenomenon that’s happened since 2021, was it? There has been different moments, of course, throughout the Palestinian struggle where there’s been armed resistance movement, but now it’s turned into this thing that’s a lot more wild with different battalions and groups, normally quite brave, young men that don’t necessarily cover their faces. They have battalions with groups of their friends, and then the Israeli army makes incursions into the camps, kills the fighters, kills civilians, collectively punishes the camps for having the fighters inside the camps, tears up the roads, and then there’s funerals afterwards. More people join up to join the brigades because of their own memories and traumas and friends that are lost. It’s just a never ending cycle of resistance.
Antonis Vradis:
Yeah, the people that have actually taken up arms, it’s not that big a number, we’re talking four to 15 in a population of thousands, but what’s really striking is how well and how much supported and respected they are from the camp residents as a whole really. There’s an incredibly wide network of support and admiration.
Again, it’s a question of how do you do justice to the footage that you’ve got, but also to the story that you’re trying to tell? I think, beyond any militaristic or narrative of braveness, which, of course, there’s massive braveness involved there, there’s something about the memory of the fighters that’s absolutely crucial. It’s a crucial part of the thread of daily life and of how this community organizes and essentially defends itself. It defends itself through memory.
Memory, in a way, I keep thinking that memory is a weapon for the Palestinians. It’s something that they’re really holding on to, and it acts as a shield against these attacks. There’s memory in at least two levels I can think of. One of them is the memory of the fighters themselves. So many of them who we spoke to told us that they joined because of another fighter, a friend or a relative who died, was killed, and then that was the defining moment, the moment when they decided they needed to take up the fight. It acts almost like a chain of the memory of loss that then feeds into the continuation of a struggle, if that makes sense. That’s how this memory chain is built, but also, for the wider community also, they’re held as heroes when they’re alive, but even more so in a way after they’re killed. They become martyrs. They become symbols really and then you see them. Didn’t we see them? Within the day, I think, all of these posters had been put up in the camp with the photos of the most recent martyrs.
Ross Domoney:
Yeah. Yeah, it all happened so quickly. It was almost an expected process. Someone would die, including people that we filmed. A person that we filmed, hours afterwards, he was killed, and then, hours after that or a day or a day and a half after that, he was already immortalized on a poster, a very well-designed poster of him as a martyr, and his family were wearing him as a picture inside a necklace. It was this whole process and cycle, and it was all related to memory and then, of course, there is the memory of the Nakba and the memory of where all of these camp residents have initially and originally fled from. I think that was also a narrative that the Palestinian resistance fighters were fighting for. It was to fight for their right to return back to their ancestral lands.
Antonis Vradis:
In a way, there’s at least two cycles of memory. There’s one very short in the grand scheme of things, very short, where there’s like the life of a fighter. They decide to join. They joined. They’re killed. They’re martyred, and then someone else will take their place. That happens relatively fast in historical terms because then there’s this wider, much bigger cycle of memory which is the Nakba, their original loss in a way, and it all goes back to that or people aspire for it to go. They want to return. It’s literally a cycle where they’re trying to get back to where they started from.
In a way, I think, this documentary is about these different cycles of memory and how they intersect really in everyday life. That’s one of the most striking, I think, things about everyday life in Palestine, in occupied Palestine, in the West Bank. It is that memory plays such a crucial role in ways that it doesn’t really in other places. It’s something I keep thinking about. It’s not as prominent here or in other European countries or in the States.
Ross Domoney:
It’s like memory is a tool of resistance, right? Even though Israel has the balance in their check with military funding and it’s so unjust the way that things work over there, they can never kill the Palestinian spirit. To be alive or to rebuild your home that’s been destroyed, to just do that act is to keep memory alive. I think that was what the resistance was. I find it’s very hard to put it into words because what’s happening in Gaza or in the West Bank is so awful. It’s not too strong a word to use things like extermination and these words that are very heavily, historically loaded, but we hope our film can keep Palestinian memory alive. That’s what we’re trying to do.
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