“ We as artists have the responsibility to be loyal to reality, and to the time and place where things happen. Art is always political, and I have to speak about a specific conflict [ that still represents ] the socioeconomic reality where these girls live,” says Shavit, who is Israeli and lives in Berlin.
Seeing the story of the El-Amur girls in Women of Refaiya was not the first time I had heard of the water crises in Palestinian territories. However, it was the first time I heard it from an Israeli point of view. I am Jewish myself, with a Mexican-Polish father and Peruvian-Turkish mother. Growing up with Israeli family members and friends, I had never been exposed to an alternative view of the conflict until college when I moved in with one of my closest friends whose mother is Palestinian.
“”
This story, of not only the El-Amur girls’ relationship with water, but countless other Palestinian families, goes widely unheard or is eclipsed by the larger looming Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I was shocked to see the response of some of my Israeli friends and family when I asked them about the Palestinians’ situation. Their response was to deem the Palestinians as“ terrorists” and declare that we needed to keep our people safe.
It is this kind of mistrust, misunderstanding, and division that fueled a film like Women
OF NOTE of Refaiya, which was commissioned as part of a larger film initiative, the Water Project. Using water as an indirect way of speaking about the larger conflict, the project’ s goal was to bring light to this issue by bringing together Israeli film students from Tel Aviv University with Palestinian filmmakers who wouldn’ t otherwise have the ability to collaborate.
“ The lack of information is very dangerous, for if you do not know what is really happening, there is no way to identify with reality. Israelis think Palestinians are terrorists and vice versa,” says Yael Perlov, Producer and Artistic Director of the Water Project.“ But to see them together and find a common language [ through film ], you see how [ communication ] can suddenly be very easy.”
The project lasted twelve months, and resulted in a series of nine evocative fiction and nonfiction films capturing a range of experiences— from the daily life of a water truck driver in the West Bank to two Israeli couples sharing a cool water spring with a group of Palestinians working in Israel to an Arab woman who cleans a wealthy home with a swimming pool.
Like Shavit’ s Women of Refaiya, the activism of the overall project was in the filmmaking process itself. It was in the exchange among students, filmmakers, and the communities they were working in, rather than in the final outcome, which proved to be a mixture of both success and complication.
Women of Refaiya screened at several festivals
23