Interview: Sarah Beddington on exile and freedom

In her debut documentary, the British artist and filmmaker Sarah Beddington let her camera roam around her friendship with the Palestinian refugee Fadia and the politics of air and land in the West Bank. Sarah has been set on a mission by Fadia to locate the tree that stands near her family’s house, in her home village of Sa’Sa’, which she has yet to visit. This ancient tree standing on the other side of Fadia’s life is the guide for Sarah to connect the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and its aftermath to Palestinian families. With hundreds of thousands of refugees living in camps and dreaming of a return, while millions of migratory birds fly in the skies above, “Fadia’s tree” is an explicit manifestation of life in deprivation and hope.  

“Fadia’s tree” has been screened at festivals in London and Jordan, among others. It has been awarded “Best Documentary” at the Karama Human Rights Film Festival and in the Barnes Film Festival. Right before the official release in cinemas, Sarah Beddington dedicated some words to her experience in making this film.

 

Let’s start with your trip. I understand that you were on a business trip to Beirut. Were you looking for something in particular when you went back to Western Asia and shortly after you met Fadia?

I was in Beirut for an art conference in 2005. I’m trained as a visual artist, that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. On my last day in the city, I was sitting in a café. There was a young woman at the next table who asked if she could speak to me. I said, “Yes, do me.” And she asked, “Are you happy?” That’s a very big question. She then said, “I am a Palestinian refugee living here in a refugee camp in Beirut. But I only have refugee status. That means that there are so many things I cannot do. The life I would like to lead I cannot do it here without citizenship.” She wanted to be an internationalist. She was actually the daughter of Fadia. This was my way in to meet with Fadia, her community and the camp. I was living in New York at the time, but we stayed in touch. She and her mother asked me to come and visit them in the camp. I asked if I can do something useful. That’s when they asked me to make a film. I don’t make films like that. Sometimes I make short films, but not documentary films. But anyway, I went to stay with them. And I took a video camera, and I started shooting. 

This was your debut feature documentary film. It was a long journey, in time and space. According to this experience, and since you were so far working with more ephemeral media or pure artistic narrations, what do you find as deficiencies and power in this medium?

This is a film that has a narrative structure. A film allows us to go backward and forwards in time. Time is not a linear construct. The past is always nudging up against the present, and much more. So in situations where the history is unresolved, which it is for the Palestinians and, and those living in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. There are over 5 million displaced people who are eligible for humanitarian aid from the UN. I’ve always done a lot of research in my projects, and I’ve always been interested in history. And in stories that perhaps take you off in an unexpected direction. But it’s through allowing yourself to go in that direction, that something unexpected may happen, which results in opening up a space that you might not have thought possible; in which dialogue can take place about whatever the nature of the subject is. So it’s kind of finding an unusual angle or perspective. In this film, I take the perspective of the migrating birds through the region for which the eastern Mediterranean area is on one of the two biggest bird migration routes in the world—as I discovered when I went to live in Jerusalem for a year in 2009. To be able to find cinematic ways of ing the birds. The maps are seen from the bird’s eye view, which is above the military surveillance of the land by those wishing to occupy it. I just felt there were avenues there, that if I kept going, I could perhaps crack something and I could weave elements together.

During your film, in between capturing the mission to find Fadia’s family tree, you present historical facts in a reporting manner. What does it mean for a British artist to inquire about the complexities of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean terrain? What does such research entail?

Well, from my perspective, the British are very complicit in the situation in the area, since when they took control of Palestine at the end of the First World War. During that time, they were one of the powers that drew up a new map of the region without any consultation with the people living in the region. All these lines appeared on a map in 1916. They were kept secret until after the war, but they were already sort of dividing the spoils between them. And so as a British person, when I go to the refugee camp, and they asked me where I’m from. When people from the older generation, who were expelled from Palestine, hear I’m British, they kind of shake their fists as if they’re talking about a politician of today. It was Balfour that created the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which promised to assist the Zionist Jewish people to create a homeland in what was Palestine. This part of history is not in the past for these people living in the camp. It’s very much part of their every day. There is still an incomprehension of how they could be in that situation. Of course, they are looking for reasons that basically stretch right back to the end of the 800 years of Ottoman control of the area when the Europeans moved in. 

The story is divided into two parts. The one is your personal relationship with Fadia, a refugee Palestinian woman and her family’s exile, and the other one is observing migrating birds’ movement. It is a cut between war implications and social structures in nature. Beyond the correlation, how do you see this parallel, between freedom of movement and exile?

When I went to Palestine, I stayed in East Jerusalem, in the Old City of Jerusalem, for the best part of a year. While I was there, I’d come out with a lot of aerial images that have been taken by the British, mostly during the First World War. I was fascinated by this aerial perspective, because there was air. We spent a lot of time in the refugee camp and that feeling of stuckness, of stagnation, of no time—time does not exist in the refugee camp. There’s no air in the camp, there’s no electricity most of the time. So it can be 40 degrees, in a place with narrow alleyways, houses stacked up in towers, because they’ve never been allowed to expand from the 1km2 of land that was donated in 1948. It’s still 1km2, but there are now 50,000 people living there. There is an incredible sense of claustrophobia. When I get to Palestine, and I met with this Palestinian ornithologist who told me about the importance of the region for the birds, and while I had these aerial images, I sort of felt there was something about the birds and the airiness; being able to travel and disregard all the lines on the map that were drawn in 1916. Onwards, I felt I really wanted to explore that, because I wanted to inject air into this situation that seemed so stuck. That’s why I pursued going to talk to ornithologists, both Palestinian and Israeli, to try and understand what the birds do, but also what people do in relation to logging and taking data from birds as they through. So the birds are not this simple metaphor for freedom. If they fly into the mist nets (that the ontology is set up during migration times so that they can record data), then the bird gets a little bracelet which is dependent on where it’s landed, in relation to the separation wall between the West Bank and Israel. They will get a little bracelet that says Israel and a unique number, or they’ll get one that says Palestine in a unique number. Then they continue with a slightly confused identity. Their freedom of being world travelers is slightly diminished. I found all of that very fascinating. So I kept going in my research, because it was a way of saying things about the situation beyond the birds themselves.

Close to the ending of the film, you present the Israeli tracking systems for migrating movements of birds. This is an interesting point in relation to perspectives, dangers and control. In this case, it is explained as avoiding lethal collisions by adapting air routes. I see it as a difficult choice to include in the film, as it brings up questions on our strong tights to our birthplace and our insistence on them. What was the idea for this part?

I had quite a lot of footage around this. I was fascinated by how the birds can potentially disrupt military actions. If there is a flock of storks, migrating north over Gaza, that means that the Israeli military perhaps cannot risk sending a plane or a drone to a particular area at a particular time. So they have developed a sort of meteorological system. A professor at Tel Aviv University developed it. It’s basically like a weather radar, that would normally be tracking clouds, but it tracks birds. This information goes directly to Israeli pilots to warn them not to fly at this level or that level. Because the collision of an aircraft with a stork or a pelican is potentially instant death. That’s the loss of human life and of extremely expensive military equipment. There is something there, something very poetic, that somehow birds could suspend a military maneuver.

It seems that by presenting the story of Fadia, you are setting light on hundreds of family stories still living in refugee camps in Lebanon and hoping for a return. The film was shown in Jordan and London, among other festivals. What were the audience’s reactions?

I’ve been very moved and surprised by the reaction of the audience. Many people, Palestinian or not, have come up and said how much this film means to them. There were also those who said this was their story too. They were also displaced from somewhere and living somewhere else, but the sense of home is always over there. It seems like the story that was about specific people and a specific place has extended to be other people’s stories in other places. That was something I could never have foreseen. 

This film would never have got made if it hadn’t been for all the strong females along the way. I’ve been very fortunate to have my producer, Susan Simnett (Over The Fence Films), who I met during a workshop. She saw that this film had something, even though she didn’t work with documentary, and she was determined to get it out into the world. This was a huge thing for me, because I’ve been doing it entirely on my own up until that point. To have that , and to be able to get it out into the world and then have this response from people. It’s very humbling to see that, after this length of time, when I wanted to give up many, many times. I found it just so hard, to make this film on my own, but then there’s a terrible weight of responsibility towards Fadia and her community that I couldn’t give up. So, to see it out in the world and how people are responding to, it is very humbling, and very extraordinary. And I hope it can be a small way of opening up debate about the Palestinian refugee situation and how it needs to be solved. 

FADIA’S TREE is released in cinemas on 5th August 2022.