BY the time Osama Qashoo was 21, he had been imprisoned 26 times and seen several childhood friends shot dead before his incredulous eyes. “When I watch old footage of my friends, it’s like, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s in prison, he’s dead,” said Osama, 25, slicing the air as he gestured at friends he would never see again. “It’s like looking at a history, like these are people who lived 50 years ago.”
While he was at university, Osama watched as Israeli checkpoints began to spring up all around him: “Checkpoints mean daily humiliations. If you want to get through a checkpoint, the soldiers can make you do things like, I have seen them ask a man to slap his father. I myself have been asked to strip naked.”
Osama and his friends mobilized five thousand people to stage a peaceful protest. As they marched toward the checkpoint, soldiers opened fire. A student leading the demonstration, holding one side of a banner calling for a free Palestine, collapsed.
He had taken three bullets in the head. “The message from the Israeli soldiers was clear,” said Osama. “There is to be no space for you Palestinians to raise your voices, no place for public resistance.”
Osama decided he would walk through the mountains to circumvent the checkpoints. It wasn’t exactly the scenic route, dotted as it was with trash landfills, but Osama saw something there, in a heap of garbage, that would prove to be an effective weapon against soldiers at checkpoints. “I found a broken camera, painted it black, wrote press on it, and started pretending to film at checkpoints and found the soldiers suddenly being nice,” he said. “The camera was the key to checkpoints. I used the name Lorenzo, and the soldiers are just young kids, eager to speak English (which I had learned from the BBC world service radio) and they would not ask too many questions.”
Then something magical happened. The broken camera took him into people’s hearts and homes: “When Palestinians turned to face the camera, they would reveal more of themselves, they started to tell me their stories, take me into their homes, and I wished I could have really filmed it all.” Then, one day while “filming” a checkpoint, Osama saw a group of Japanese journalists being mistreated. Using his ‘press’ credentials, which consisted mostly of the camera and a vest with the words ‘TV press,’ Osama rescued them from the soldiers’ wrath. “They wanted the pictures, they insisted, and kept saying it would be a big story but I kept saying no, I cannot, then they offered me money, and I said, OK look, you will be the first to know my secret: There are no pictures, and I told them how I used the camera as resistance,” said Osama.
That day Osama got his first real camera. The Japanese reporters left him a small DV handicam after hearing about his predicament. “During those days, I did not really know how to operate a camera; for me it was a physical reaction to everything, the daily humiliations, when your friends are killed in front of you, it makes you want to pick up a gun and shoot,” said Osama, who picked up a camera instead.
By the time he was accepted into the National Film and Television School, Osama had already come a long way from when he first landed in London, friendless, homeless, with three pounds in his pocket. He had borrowed money, looked for sponsors, and asked for help in trying to find some way to eke out an existence.
“It’s hard when you are illegal,” said Osama, who just got the visa he has been waiting for. “Those were tough times, and I didn’t see my family for years. When I wanted to talk to someone, I would go to old people’s homes and talk to the elderly. Just so I could have someone to speak to.” Now, after 400 screenings across Europe of his documentary film, “My Dear Olive Tree,” there is no dearth of eager listeners or viewers.
When Osama was looking for direction, he decided to shift his focus from the blood he saw spilt senselessly in Palestine to the tragic heroism of the people he met there.
“People shut off when they see blood,” he says, explaining why his film avoids the gore that is everyday reality in Palestine. “I don’t blame them, I was traumatized the first time a friend died in front of me, but it became normal, which is unfortunate. But to tell this story, I chose a beautiful symbol: I built the drama around the olive tree and its importance to our lives, and why the Palestinians must defend the olive trees against the Israelis.”
Osama, who has just returned from Cuba, where he has been offered a summer course and teaching position, is passionate about a society’s right to see itself reflected on a medium as powerful as television. “It is encouragement when you see a reflection of yourself. Imagine that you grew up in a house without mirrors, and then suddenly you saw your reflection; you wouldn’t be able to recognize yourself. You can only see the strengths and the ugliness when you watch it played back to you.”
Osama is particularly outraged at the use of American or foreign programming in Arab countries. “We cannot grow up watching dubbed versions of “Friends.” We need our own programming. We need to reflect on our own society,” said Osama, who is concerned that a society that cannot see itself, will never see its flaws, and will subsequently not feel the need to correct itself. “Think of it as if you and your partner are fighting. There is a lot of name-calling and the fight will just go back and forth and back and forth but imagine if someone were taping this secretly, and then you watched the footage. You would see how ugly some of that behavior was,” he says. “We need to look at our own internal issues and examine the roles of, for example, children, who are treated like bits of furniture; also the role of women in Palestine needs to be looked at. We need to discuss, debate, and address problems, not escape into American television and films.”
Strong words from a storyteller who hopes to wake a generation of Arabs to the problems littering their own homes and mentalities while rousing the outside world from its complicity in those problems.
