A FILMMAKER IN PALESTINE

Nov. 15, 2006

When you watch a documentary,
you might think, that must be fun to do. Exciting, meaningful work. Travel. A captive audience. Yes, there’s that. But there’s also this. Impossibly low pay, sparse audiences, and little to no name recognition unless you’re very lucky.A career -- money-wise -- second only to writing poetry.
And yet if it’s your passion, there’s not much of a choice. Rebecca Glotfelty feels that her life experiences culminated into the making of “Sucha Normal Thing,” a small budget documentary about Palestinians in the West Bank.
The life experiences she speaks of began in her teen years. She remembers watching the news in the early 1980s about the war between Israel and Lebanon. She asked her mom: “’How come they call it a military strike when Israel drops a bomb on an apartment building full of civilians, and terrorism when it’s a Palestinian civilian setting off a bomb?’
“I was always spouting off,” she admits. “My sister, on the other hand, would want to turn the channel. She’d say, ‘Who watches this! Enough already!’ I remember thinking, ‘I do.’”

INTRIGUED
The news was her biggest window to the Middle East. Glotfelty grew up in the small downstate town of Marshall. She was intrigued by the Palestinian embroidery collected by her grandparents at a refugee camp; they were both Methodist ministers and went to the Holy Land in the 1950s.
She went onto study at MSU’s rigorous James Madison international relations program. Then at the age of 21, she stepped outside the bounds of the academic world to see the Middle East for herself.
Her college roommate, Khadijah, invited her for a summer at her home in Tunisia. Because of the language barrier, Glotfelty didn’t go out by herself for the entire summer, always needing someone to accompany her. She desperately missed her freedom.
On the other hand, she learned the cultural rules of the Middle East and how to conduct herself in public. “You really have to put on an emotional mask. You don’t look at men directly, but out of the corner of your eye. Even if they say something, you don’t respond. Responding is worse.
“So you feel like you’re being rude, but the good thing about being a woman there is that you don’t have to respond to a stranger if you don’t want to. It’s also the hardest part for me. If someone looks at me, I think I should smile, but that’s not respectable. Carrying on a conversation in a store is acceptable, but not on the street.”
There are men who do say sexist and insulting things, but Glotfelty, an attractive brunette, said it isn’t typical. “People who are respectable would never say those things to you.”
She also learned that religious men were more likely to conduct themselves politely. “So if you’re going to stand on a crowded bus, you stand next to someone who is religious.” The telltale sign in Egypt: a visible circle on the forehead from pressing on the ground in prayer.
She now marvels at tourists who show up in the Middle East wearing shorts or a tank top: “It would be like wearing a bathing suit here.”

MIDEAST STUDY
Three years later, she took another trip to the Middle East to study Arabic in
Jordan and to attend the American University
in Cairo, Egypt.
She seized an opportunity at that time to teach English to African refugees in Cairo.
“It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” she said. “So many bad things have happened to these people, and so many are able to rebound from it. Others, though, very obviously suffered from depression.
“One of my students was Mohammed.He was a very devote Muslim, impeccably dressed in a white, pressed shirt and tie. He always had a smile on his face. Mohammed was from Sudan and was studying at Al Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world, founded soon after the creation of Islam. Mohammed invited me and some other friends to his dorm room one evening.
“I thought it was a privilege to experience that. I had a preconceived idea of what the school and the students would be like. This idea was shattered at 9 p.m. when my friend took us into the dorm rec room where a group of students had already assembled to watch the ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ (an American soap opera).”
Back home again, Glotfelty decided to study video production and took a job with a video company at the age of 28. Another experience that bent her to the left.
“We produced promotional videos for a meat rendering company that was later cited by the DEQ for having huge blood cesspools
in the back of the factory. They hired
Guatemalans to chop the meat, and they’d get carpal tunnel syndrome after about six months. When they couldn’t use the workers anymore, they’d ship them back to Guatemala. After that shoot, a client who manufactured cluster bombs hired us to go to South Carolina to shoot inside the factory. I asked myself, what was I doing there?”

TELLING THE TRUTH
That experience inspired the videog-rapher to tell the truth, as opposed to sanitizing it. She opened her own business, Real People Media, in 2000. Initially she videotaped family stories and events.
“I love doing stories on families—their simple stories of perseverance and survival are amazing. I talked to a woman about her grandma whose husband died in the early 1900s and raised two kids, while running a general store near Bear Lake and a rental cabin. It was such a courageous story.”
A year later, she moved to Charlevoix to set up an art gallery with her ex-husband. She liked the beauty and slower pace of Northern Michigan, but felt misplaced when the terrible events of 9/11 unfolded. “I remember thinking, ‘Why am I up here in Northern Michigan running an art gallery when I’ve spent half my life studying Middle Eastern issues?”’
She was alarmed by America’s decision to invade Iraq, and deeply shaken when she realized that a former classmate was one of the neocons in the Pentagon who urged the invasion.
“I thought, how did this happen? I studied Arabic with him. I thought I knew him. But it did spur me into action. I thought how one person can have so much influence on people. For me personally, I realized, I can’t do everything, but I can do one thing.”

CRAZY, DANGEROUS
Serendipitously, a small group from the Grand Traverse area group, Mideast: Just Peace, was planning a trip to the Israeli occupied West Bank. “I thought that it was crazy to go there. It’s dangerous. But then I thought, I have a bachelor’s degree in international studies, I studied Arabic, I started a video production company. Why the heck don’t I go?”
In addition to wanting to make a documentary, Glotfelty had personal reasons for going: “Because of 9-11, I found myself developing prejudices toward Arabs. Me! I was developing negative feelings, and I wanted to confront that. I knew if I personally got to meet more people from the Middle East, all those scary feelings would subside and they did.”
Her documentary directly addresses that prejudice—the perception that the Middle East is a desert wasteland with Palestinians riding camels and throwing rocks. “All that we are allowed to normally see is the conflict and militant actions of the Palestinians without any context of the situation and history. I wanted to capture what is really there—a society, a culture, a people. I wanted to show what it’s really like—like the brief glimpse in the film of a little boy getting his hair cut, people grocery shopping and just trying to live in the same way we do.
Glotfelty’s 80-minute film is polished and intense. She documents the peace group’s four-week trip through the cities and villages of the West Bank, interviewing those who live there, along with Israelis, nationals, and Palestinian people working non-violently
for peace.

PEOPLE ON EDGE
Although the movie shows some normal moments, the people are clearly on edge. A man arrives to harvest his olives, only to discover his trees were chopped down the night before. A mom with her young boy—recovering from an appendix surgery—waited hours at a checkpoint and finally gave up.
A farmer, whose land was split by the new wall, now must go through a checkpoint and take a taxi to his land.
Watching the film at times raises questions. How do these people make a living when they can’t harvest olives or get through the checkpoints? What do they live on? You get the impression that Israeli soldiers are randomly busting into homes, kidnapping young men. It evokes images of Nazis doing the same thing to Jews. But in retrospect, you wonder if the home invasions are so innocent? Was the kidnapped young man connected to a suicide bombing?
Yet some of the stories leave no room for doubt. One middle-aged man talked about his mother sitting on the porch doing embroidery work on a sunny morning. He was inside the house at the time, along with his father, an ear, nose, and throat doctor. Their house was spacious and well-kept. He told of neighbors seeing Israeli soldiers driving by in a jeep; how he heard gunshots, and rushed out to discover his mother slumped against the door, bleeding from the head. He cried, his disbelief and anguish settling into your own heart. He talked about confronting the soldiers on the way back, standing in the middle of the road and forcing the jeep to stop. The soldiers gave no reason or apology for what happened. End of story. No trial, not even a hand slap.

INVASION
“My whole thing is speaking from the heart,” Glotfelty said. “I wanted to show the daily life, and how it became dangerous even for our peace team. We were eating at a restaurant, and there was a curfew called on Al-Jazeera television that was to go into effect in three minutes. The Israelis invaded the town, and as it turns out, we should have stayed put at the restaurant.”
After a harrowing drive down the street, the peace team made it back to the hotel. A few hours later, they looked out the window and saw a lone Palestinian walking straight up as if he didn’t have a care in the world. A peace team member asked a Palestianian friend if the man could get shot. His answer: It’s true, a soldier can shoot anyone during a curfew, but this man doesn’t care if he dies. He believes he is already dead and has nothing to lose.
That night a Palestinian was shot. The sole provider for 10 people, he was returning home from work and was going through a checkpoint. One Israeli soldier said he could pass by, so he did, but another soldier shot him. In the documentary, he was in a coma and his young, pretty wife stood by his bed. He died two days later.
The intense emotion of the film is draining. It seems most Palestinians have resigned themselves to a life of house arrest. There is a lot of footage of Israeli and internationalist peace activists who tend to speak loudly, without taking a breath between many, many sentences. Perhaps it is because someone is actually listening.

A NEW PROJECT
I asked Glotfelty about presenting the Israeli side to this issue. Her answer: she believes that Americans get pretty much the Israeli viewpoint and this provides a small counterweight. She added that during her recent trip to the Middle East, she had had the opportunity to interview several Jewish settlers and a former zionist and soldier in the 1948 war. Glotfelty’s most recent project is called, “What I am Thinking.”
This fascinating 20-minute documen-tary includes interviews with conservatives and liberals alike about what they think of the Middle East. She then videotapes Palestinians’ responses to what the Americans said. The movie succeeds in addressing our “fear factor” of the Middle East, while giving Palestinians a chance to see us and not our government.
That exhibit was first shown at a university library in Palestine with Glotfelty as an honored guest. She hopes the resulting video can be used by groups or schools to help initiate dialogue regarding U.S./Middle East relations.
Glotfelty is now working on several videos for the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawas and a documentary on how people recycle “trash” for fun and profit. She’s also filming a sequel to “Sucha Normal Life.” “It’s called Waging Peace: Christian Peacemaker Team,” a documentary about peace activists escorting Palestinian children to school.
“One of the things I’ve learned in my work is that everybody is a teacher. That’s how I look at an interview. What do they have to teach me about myself, about my life that I wouldn’t know prior to going into this. I’m not trying to figure out what’s right or wrong, or to validate what I already know. I want to know what they have to say, and I know it will expand my personal horizon.”

To buy “Sucha Normal Thing” go to www.ameu.org (Americans for Middle East Understanding).