Welcome to Sarajevo: one director's journey from Gaza to the film festival
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Version 0 of 1. "He was holding his twins," says Ashraf Mashharawi, leaning forward. "All his family around him. They had been able to shelter in their basement. But it was a direct hit and their house collapsed. It took two days to reach them. When we did, I helped to move the rubble from above them. He was sitting in the corner, holding his girls, one under each arm. They were all only slightly injured, so they must have died slowly." Mashharawi looks at me again, with concern. "Excuse me for such harshness," he says. "But this is our everyday life". It is the final day of the 20th Sarajevo film festival, an event conceived as an act of defiance in the face of the horrific war of 1994. In a now-peaceful square bathed in sunshine, war seems far away. The splatter of a mortar dropped 20 years ago is still etched into the side of a building, but all around us people chat animatedly, drinking Bosnian coffee, discussing, dealing, laughing. Mashharawi, 33, is a film-maker from Gaza who documented the 2008-09 war. He has also made films about slavery in Yemen and the history of Libya. When he discovered that, together with director Abdel Salam Shehadeh, he had won the festival's 2014 Katrin Cartlidge award, he was determined to collect it in person, particularly as airstrikes had prevented Shehadeh from attending. Mashharawi managed to get through the Rafah crossing, go by bus to Cairo, catch a flight to Istanbul, and then reach Sarajevo. It was there, late on Thursday, that he received the prize from Ken Loach, before an audience of 3,000 people. "It was very hard to leave my family, but my wife told me: 'Go, go, go! For all of us.' It is a duty to come here to bring the voices of the victims. They chase you." He laughs lightly. "I will be OK, it will be fine." The award is a $10,000 (£6,027) bursary from the Katrin Cartlidge Foundation, set up after the actor died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2002. She was my best friend. I know she would have supported the choice of winner, and she would have been delighted that the audience rose as one to applaud Mashharawi as he took to the stage and accepted the award, identifying himself as "the voice of so many, the voice of those who can no longer speak". After deafening applause, he turned to me, as a trustee of the foundation, to read Shehadeh's letter. Here is a part of it. Greetings from here. Here in Gaza, we welcome you from our vast and abundant sea; a sea of stories, tales, migrations, travels. We are grateful for your dedication and solidarity and to the flow of human conscience, and to an inevitable justice that is surely coming … We welcome you from our vineyards, where the sun sings lullabies of its beginnings, full of colour, casting bronze shimmers as it sets over our eternal, passionate sea. We welcome you from our ancient and ever-renewing olive trees. We welcome you from the Mentar Hills in the south all the way to the highest point, in our Galilee. Our library, our consciousness, our heritage, and our memory is embroidered in all colours … in light, joy and good omens. They are shelling our homes, every house a Hiroshima; souls leave us, dreams depart and so do memories. In a moment we become racing numbers on a television screen; a moment before was a moment of life. So I tell the thickheaded fools that know nothing of life this: we are coming, we are ever-present. Because it is Gaza's patience that has painted the light of hope, the stories of young women and night lanterns. It will not be much longer for this night, they will not shatter its morning, they will not extinguish its heart. [It is] Gaza the voice that has defeated cannons and battered their tyranny with an all-encompassing hope. We love you, people of the Balkans; our partners in pain and pride. Sarajevo and Gaza are witnesses to the injustice of history, relentless in the conscience of history. Mashharawi sits in the sunny square the next day. His friend is, he says, a very poetic man. He gestures around. "That is all we want. To share with others what it is like here. People constantly think everyone wants to get out of Gaza, leave it forever. But we shall never leave. It is a beautiful place." He laughs again, his optimism unquenchable. That night, after the closing ceremony, we repair to a fish restaurant, swap ideas, propose plots. The table is awash with invention. Loach suggests a workshop with his writer, Paul Laverty; Mashharawi invites everyone to visit. Laughter and possibilities pour out into the night. Then, a phone call: the bombing has begun again. With even greater intensity. It will not be possible for Ashraf to get back into Gaza for the foreseeable. It is proposed he stays in Bosnia. But his visa runs out the next day, and he would have to live a prisoner in the Palestinian embassy until a new one is issued. That could take an age. Someone proposes calling the minister, then a more powerful minister, then the president. Mashharawi will not hear of it. "Any problem I make will make it more difficult for another Palestinian to move around next time. Imagine how difficult it is simply if someone from the West Bank falls in love with someone in Gaza. To visit him she would have to go to Jordan, then to Aman, then to Egypt, then cross into Rafah. It can take a week. And then we are not allowed to stay indefinitely." We are quiet now, but Ashraf's tone remains light. "Don't worry. If you can get me to Jordan or Beirut I will wait there, until it is possible to return. All will be well." He smiles at me reassuringly. "And we will make films. In 20 years, we will all be together at the film festival in Gaza." Georges Braque once wrote that art is a wound turned into light. Mashharawi's words give you faith that such a sentiment might just be true. • Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel in Sarajevo |