After an amazing start to Christmas-tide at St George's Cathedral, greatly aided by the music of the Choir of London, I'm now on with the filming. Today was spent mainly at Kalandia checkpoint, and walking the route of a former one near Birzeit University. The film crew I'm working with are excellent on the details, the humour is good, and the results we viewed back at the studios tonight were very pleasing. I'm having problems making sense of how to use the video diary camera effectively though: Labib the cameraman is sympathetic but I can tell that I just haven't got the knack yet!
Tomorrow the crew come to St George's: we'll be filming in East Jerusalem and the Old City -- the work is steady, and I've been careful to offer a schedule which allows plenty of space for breaks, reflection and the scope to squeeze in a few extra bits. That made today very mellow, and satisfying, hopefully the same will apply to tomorrow.
Viewing the footage of the checkpoints, after the event, allowed all sorts of feelings to surface for me, as I saw the stark details of what the people of Ramallah and the West Bank are being subjected to by the IDF on a daily basis. I hope this work does show a solidarity which goes beyond tokenism -- though I feel that can only be proved if the film is successful. I do feel anxious about that aspect of the work -- that it might not get anywhere beyond the pilot 10 minutes we are preparing for. I'm not by nature a gambling person, and this feels like a huge risk since there are no guarantees. There are so many aspects of the this project which are new to me that I can only say 'onward and upward'.
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