Mohamed Jabaly (32) looks like a real filmmaker. His mop of curls is tied in a ponytail, a sweater from a Norwegian film festival leaves his hairy chest bare, the sleeves rolled up.
Yet Jabaly feels detached at the IDFA film festival in Amsterdam, where his documentary is being shown for the second time this week.
Jabaly finds it difficult to sit in a cafe and drink coffee, knowing that at any moment he could receive news that a loved one has been killed.
“I am a Gazan wherever I am. My family, my friends, my life there, they follow me everywhere I go.”
The fact that he is here now is the result of coincidences. Even the result of a joke.
When Israel bombed Gaza in 2014, on day one Jabaly said to the Gazan hospital where he happened to be: let me ride in the ambulance, with my camera. He said it jokingly.
And he thought Israel’s military operation would last a day or two, a week at most. But in the end, Jabaly spent the entire war, 51 days, as a co-driver in the Palestinian ambulance.
He simply left his camera running, during bombing raids in the dark, while loading seriously wounded people, while searching for corpses, during wild rides through the besieged city, while scrubbing out the blood.
Jabaly was the first to arrive on the beach with the ambulance four boys playing were killed by the Israeli army. The images are choppy. You only hear the panting of the ambulance team as they run back in vain with a stretcher with a body on it.
Arctic Circle
Jabaly was already interested in cinema at the time, but did not actually want to make a film about war. He filmed from that ambulance, he says, just for himself. To control his fear. Trying to understand what was happening around him.
Ambulance became a chilling documentary. The viewer feels the fear as the sky breaks into pieces with a thunderous noise. The devastation when someone’s house is gone. The panic when there are still people under the rubble. The sadness when the bad news comes. Rarely did it see IDFA, where Ambulance was shown in 2016, so many crying men.
This week is running here Al Haya Helwa (‘life is beautiful’), a documentary that shows what happened to Jabaly after the 2014 war. He accepted an invitation to a conference in Tromsø, Norway, where he knew a filmmaker, and got stuck there because Egypt closed its border with Gaza.
To pass the time, during the dark and lonely winter above the Arctic Circle, Jabaly made a documentary of his ambulance equipment. “I didn’t want to just sit there and wait for my fate.”
Seeing the images again, he says, immediately healed his war trauma. “It helped me share my experience and my pain. If everyone in the cinema felt the same way I did.”
But then his Norwegian visa expired, and the border with Gaza was still closed. Because he had no film diploma and no passport (Norway sees Palestinians, just like the Netherlands, as stateless), a long and tiring journey followed through Norwegian authorities, which he ultimately concluded triumphantly with a place to study at the art academy in Oslo. But then he hadn’t seen his mother for seven years.
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Shower
His mother has now died, and Gaza is in the middle of a new war. “Of course I try to accept that people are just sitting in the café here. I tell myself: breathe. Breath. But it is very tough.”
His family recently fled Gaza City to Deir al-Balah, further south. They’re still alive. But Jabaly doesn’t know if they have water, how to go to the toilet. Whether his house is still there.
He plays a voice message from his aunt, saying goodbye to him, just to be sure. “Since God brought people to earth, what is happening to us has not happened. A true massacre,” said her aunt.
Jabaly barely gets in touch with his friends. A friend wrote to him that one night during the 2023 war is roughly equivalent to all 51 days in 2014.
Now when he is in the shower in the Volkshotel in Amsterdam, Jabaly thinks about Gaza and feels guilty. “Part of me says: hide, lock yourself up, don’t meet people. Because it is not fair that some people live in peace and my people are killed.”
But he tries to fight his guilt. “If my voice becomes lower, it will have a detrimental effect on my family. I have to stand up and speak out here, make our voices heard. So that I can give them strength from here.”
The Palestinian Film Institute (PFI) called on filmmakers on Sunday to withdraw their films from IDFA, in protest against the festival’s response to an incident during its opening night.
This was disrupted last week by demonstrators with a banner with the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free‘ was written. Israeli filmmakers signed objects to thisafter which IDFA adopted the slogan convicted as “hurtful”..
Jabaly gives differently than his colleague Basma al-Sharifno response the PFI’s call. His film will be shown all week. “I want to be heard,” is what he said himself on Sunday during a meeting with Palestinian filmmakers. “Everything has been destroyed. All that remains are our stories and our freedom of expression.”
Bird
Jabaly would like to tell his story in Amsterdam, but he also finds it painful. “So painful that every time we are killed, we have to explain who we are again and educate the world. It is not a lesson for us. It is our life.”
Then he takes off. “I am not a supporter of Hamas, and not in favor of armed resistance. But that armed resistance existed long before Hamas existed. This story did not start on October 7.”
The Palestinians have been living under occupation since 1967. Gaza has been blockaded for sixteen years. There are settlements on the West Bank. Jabaly: “The violence against the Palestinians has been going on for a long time. If you lock a bird in a cage, it will also try to escape.”
Jabaly escaped, coincidentally. But he wants to go back to Gaza. He has permission from the municipality to build a cinema in Gaza City. Of course, that permission dates from before October 7. Now they see him coming. “They will laugh at me.” But Jabaly wants it anyway.
These days he is meeting other Palestinian filmmakers in Amsterdam to discuss how they can bring what is happening in Gaza to the big screen. But actually Jabaly doesn’t want to make a film about war at all.
Life is beautiful, the title of his second film, is also Jabaly’s life motto. “Because even when life is not beautiful, like now, that is what I want to believe. That life will ultimately be beautiful.”
Gaza is also beautiful, says Jabaly. He would really like to show that to the world. “We are still here. We keep hope. We can even smile.”
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