5 days to go until PalFest
April 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
The Palestine Festival of Literature will be opening on May 1st. Creative producer Omar Robert Hamilton’s report from Ramallah found below provides a unique behind-the-scenes look at the event from a production angle. (Be sure to also check out PalFest’s website and become a fan of them on Facebook for regular updates.)
With five days to go until PalFest 2010, the production team is in full swing on the ground. Working from offices at the A M Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, the team is working to get everything in place for a festival that runs in 6 cities over 6 days.
There’s a great spirit and energy around the festival. It’s so much bigger than in previous years, with theatre productions, staged readings, exhibition openings and film screenings happening across the country.
This means we all need to keep moving. Every day someone’s travelling to another city — which is actually one of the hardest things to do in Palestine.
Our opening and closing nights are in Jerusalem, but the Israeli permit system does not allow half of the staff to go there. We have meetings in Bethlehem and Hebron in the South – but the South and the North of the West Bank are divided by Ma’ale Adumim — an enormous settlement that spreads out into the West Bank. With Palestinian license plates you have no choice but to drive round it — a two hour crawl through the “Valley of Fire”. In contrast, Israeli plates get you on to the settler road — a nicely paved 45 minute journey.
There are more uncertainties being cast over the festival by the twin threats of Iceland’s volcanic output and the new Israeli military order which gives the army authority to deport anyone in the West Bank who doesn’t have a West Bank ID. But despite everything, there is an incredibly positive atmosphere around the festival.
We’re particularly excited about taking PalFest to Nablus this year. Access to the city has been severely restricted for several years, but now, and for unknown reasons, the army has at least temporarily loosened its grip. So we’re staging two nights in Palestine’s second largest city. The first is in an old but still functioning Turkish bath. The second will be in a beautifully restored castle overlooking the valley of Beit Wazen and will be an integrated mixture of live music and poetry.
Nablus epitomizes the spirit that keeps Palestine alive. It is a city that has been subjected to years of isolation, nightly raids, shootings and everything else that military occupation brings, but the people refuse to be turned away from culture and the arts. We are competing with a Jean Genet reading on one of the nights. And from poetry in Nablus to theatre in Hebron we see again and again that — even under the most appalling stress — Palestine insists on culture, on music, on poetry. And so insists on freedom.
