Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Scandar Copti returns to the Marrakech International Film Festival one year after winning the top prize in competition with Happy Holidays.
This year, he is attending Marrakech’s project incubator, Atlas Workshops, with development project A Childhood, a part-animated documentary about children growing up under Israeli occupation in Palestine.
Copti first broke onto the international scene with Ajami, co-directed with Yaron Shani, which won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Both Ajami and Happy Holidays used mostly non-professional actors in stories about Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, but his latest film, A Childhood, is instead “a hybrid documentary featuring animation”.
A Childhood documents the lives of Palestinian children, where everything from play to imagination is controlled.
The film is “a direct continuation of what I started doing in Happy Holidays”, says Copti, of what he describes as “the rebranding of genocide”, a genocide that is not recognised as such. The film highlights “the banality of evil”, Copti says, quoting Hannah Arendt, and a gradual attempt to “demonise the Palestinians”.
“[The documentary] is a cinematic act of resistance,” Copti continues. ”What does humanity mean in a world that can see all this injustice and stay indifferent? I’m not a politician, I’m not a human rights lawyer. What I can do is somehow combine images and sound to make them convey an idea and this is what I do.”
Archive footage
A Childhood is produced by Copti’s Fresco Films and co-produced by France’s Tessalit Productions and Señorita Films, with Denmark’s ToolBox Film.
Copti began work on A Childhood in 2020, when the Covid lockdown forced him to halt work on Happy Holidays. He found most of the footage for A Childhood online - YouTube was a particularly valuable source - and then secured further footage from NGOs.
“It’s parents, siblings, neighbours, passersby that filmed children in the West Bank getting arrested, abused, imprisoned and so on,” he says. “I also have testimonies from those same children after they get released from Israeli prisons.”
Once pandemic restrictions lifted, Copti returned to shooting Happy Holidays, and his research on A Childhood took a backseat.
While in Marrakech, Copti is looking to “connect with top producers from the Arab world,” but not just co-producers in the traditional sense; he also wants to connect with what he calls “skilled people who could be a part of it, because the film is a hybrid work and needs animation”. Animation will be used to tell the parts of the story for which there is no archival footage.
Before arriving in Morocco, Copti took the project to the Palestinian Film Institute showcase at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November. The filmmaker doesn’t expect the project to go through any further labs.
“There is no sense going round and round,” he explains. “It just takes up your time, instead of working on what matters. And the Atlas Workshops is great, it’s huge exposure.”
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