Film's 'Search for Palestine' Takes Center Stage at Cairo Festival

The tale of a distinctly Palestinian road trip -- through refugee camps and Israeli checkpoints -- takes center stage in director Rashid Masharawi's latest film, which debuted at this year's Cairo International Film Festival.
"It's a search for home, a search for Palestine, for ourselves," Masharawi told AFP a day after Wednesday's world premiere of his new film "Passing Dreams".
It kicked off the Middle East's oldest film festival, which opened with a traditional dabkeh dance performance by a troupe from the war-torn Gaza Strip.
Masharawi's film follows Sami, a 12-year-old boy, and his uncle and cousin on a quest to find his beloved pet pigeon, which has flown away from their home in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Told that pigeons always return to their birthplace, the family attempts to "follow the bird home" -- driving a small red camper van from Qalandia camp and Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank to the Old City of Jerusalem and the Israeli city of Haifa.

Their odyssey, Masharawi says, becomes a "deeply symbolic journey" that represents an inversion of the family's original displacement from Haifa during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel -- a period Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or "catastrophe".
"It's no coincidence we're in places that have a deep significance to Palestinian history," the director said, speaking to AFP after a more intimate second screening on Thursday.
'From Ground Zero'
The bittersweet tale is a far cry from Masharawi's other project featured at the Cairo film festival: "From Ground Zero".
The anthology, supervised by the veteran director, showcases 22 shorts by filmmakers in Gaza, shot against the backdrop of war.
For that project, Masharawi -- who was the first Palestinian director officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival for his film "Haifa" in 1996 -- "wanted to act as a bridge between global audiences" and filmmakers on the ground.
In April, he told AFP the anthology intended to expose "the lie of self-defence", which he said was Israel's justification for its devastating military campaign in Gaza.
The war broke out following Palestinian militant group Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel has since killed more than 43,700 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-controlled territory's health ministry.
"As filmmakers, we must document this through the language of cinema," Masharawi said, adding that filmmaking "defends our land far better than any military or political speeches".
Smuggled onto set
Speaking to an enthralled audience, the 62-year-old director -- donning his signature fedora -- called for change in Palestinian filmmaking.
"Our cinema can't always only be a reaction to Israeli actions," he said.
"It must be the action itself."
A self-taught director born in a Gaza refugee camp before moving to Ramallah, Masharawi is intimately familiar with the "obstacles to filmmaking under occupation" -- including "separation walls, barriers, who's allowed to go where".
Like the family in the film, "you never know if authorities will let you get to your location", he said, especially since Masharawi refuses "on principle" to seek permits from Israeli authorities.
Instead, his crew often resorts to makeshift schemes -- including "smuggling in" actors from the West Bank who do not have permission to visit Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.
"If you ask (Israeli authorities) for permission to shoot in Jerusalem, you're giving them legitimacy that Jerusalem is theirs," he said Thursday to raucous applause from audience members, many of them draped in Palestinian keffiyehs.
Organizers canceled the Cairo film festival last year after calls for the suspension of artistic and cultural activities across the Arab world in solidarity with Palestinians.
But this week, keffiyehs have dotted the red carpet, while audience members wore pins bearing the Palestinian flag and the map of historic Palestine.
Festival president Hussein Fahmy voiced solidarity "with our brothers in Gaza and Lebanon", where Israel's bombing campaign and ground offensive have killed 3,360 people.
Pride of place, Fahmy said, has been given to Palestinian cinema, with a handful of films showing during the festival and a competition to crown a winner among the 22 filmmakers in "From Ground Zero".

Songwriter and singer Charles Dumont, who composed the song "Non, je ne regrette rien" ("No, I do not regret anything") made world famous by Edith Piaf, has died aged 95, his partner told AFP Monday.
Dumont, who had also collaborated with American singer Barbra Streisand and French-Italian 1960s star Dalida, died at home after a long illness.
French Culture Minister Rachida Dati called Dumont "a towering figure of French chanson".
A trumpeter by training, Dumont saw his career transformed at the turn of the 1960s when he convinced the star singer Piaf to perform one of his compositions, after having been forcefully refused several times.
"We turned up at her home, and she let us in," Dumont told AFP in 2018 about the day in 1960 when he managed to see Piaf together with his lyricist, Michel Vaucaire.
"I played the piece on the piano, and ... we became inseparable," he said, adding that the song -- which he had written in 1956 aged 27 -- revived Piaf's career that he said had been flagging.
"Non, je ne regrette rien" has since become an unforgettable classic of Piaf, who died in 1963.
"My mother gave birth to me, but Edith Piaf brought me into the world," Dumont told AFP in a 2015 interview.
"Without her, I would never have done everything I did, neither as a composer nor as a singer," he added.
For Dumont, this meeting marked the beginning of a fruitful working relationship with Piaf, resulting in his writing more than 30 songs for her.
'Goodbye young man'
On occasion she straightened him out, like one night after a concert when he complained to her that the audience had not been good.
"She looked me straight in the eye and said: 'It's not them who are bad. It's you who was no good'," he remembered.
The collaboration with Piaf gave Dumont the confidence to approach Streisand, who was already a star in the 1960s and well on her way to becoming one of the biggest-selling recording artists ever.
A music publisher suggested he should offer her his services, advice he later described as "destiny" giving him "a kick in the behind".
He went to New York, and played for her on a piano in her dressing room in a Broadway theater. "She said to me 'I like this very much. I'll make the record. Goodbye young man'," he said.
Streisand released a single with Dumont's "Le Mur" sung in French on the A side, and its English version "I've Been Here" on the B side, in 1966.
Dumont's last appearance on stage was in 2019 in Paris.
"When you come back in front of an audience, who come to see you as they came 20, 30 or 40 years ago and give you the same welcome, then they give you back your 20s," he said.

Film's 'Search for Palestine' Takes Center Stage at Cairo Festival