In I'd like to Visit (2017), you compose a letter. It's drafted and modified. The writer's point of view is that of a stateless Palestinian with a Jordanian passport and a wish to “visit Israel.” The piece ends with that wish after the text is deleted. How did the work begin? 

The reason I came to Canada is to try and go to Palestine. Unfortunately, with my Jordanian passport, I’d be denied a visa. The work is partly about a journey which I need to undertake to get a Canadian passport only to be allowed into the city that my parents are from. It was a wish to go back to Palestine. But I had to think of how to express that wish in English to a North American audience. I have to use “Israel” to try and explain the wish. Where my family's from is part of what is now  Israel, not the West Bank, not Gaza. I'm from a family that was displaced by the creation of the state of Israel. That’s the thinking that manifested in the work. 

Let me ask you about some comparable work. Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001 - 2003) plays on the letter writing form too, to express a similar desire for return. Does the epistolary or letter writing style of art making hold a special promise for you as a mode of resistance? 

For me, it wasn't necessarily about letter writing, but communication and language. Letter writing is a pinnacle form of that. This is a more contemporary version of the form, edited like a social media post, on a computer screen through a word processor. It's a short and outward form of communication, with an anonymous other. This work feels more public facing, and it grapples with the public space constituted by the English language.  

I'm reminded of a Hito Steyerl paper on “Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams” about the postcolonial revenge fantasies of Nigerian email and text scams. She tracks the alterations of the Victorian letter form in the digital age, and notes that the sentimental part of it is still there, instrumentalized, sometimes awkwardly in English. P is for Palestine (2019) is also very much about inhabiting English, in an uncomfortable but purposeful way. A clean-cut Arabic speaking man is shown in a dressing room practicing the formation of his P-sounds before he's called onto the stage. The words he uses – “peace,” “prospect,” “Palestine,” “opposed,” - are suggestive. How did you develop the idea for this work? 

In the initial idea I had this vision of someone trying to practice their P. It’s an interesting sound in the Arab world because Arabic doesn't have it, so it's pronounced “B.” Correctly pronouncing the letter “P” there becomes a signifier of cultural and economic capital, and social status. The work leaves open the question of whether the practice is for an act, a speech or some other performance. Are they giving a lecture? Is this a political lecture? Is he a politician? It’s deliberately vague but what’s clear is instead of practicing the content of the script, the man is more obsessed with making sure that his “P’s” are correct. The choice of the words followed from there, “Palestine” being the most interesting. I remember making fun of Yasser Arafat when I was a kid – when he said “beace brocess” instead of “peace process.” The politics he was trying to express were hidden behind those sounds. The assumption for me, then, is that the man in the video is going to give a political talk, but the actual political core of it is lost in his attempt to gain respectability. I like the idea of the pragmatism of it though. Some of these characters, even in I Would Like to Visit, are just trying to find a way to talk about Palestine, and to be heard. But in both cases I’m interested in the cost of that. The aesthetic of P is for Palestine, its cinematic grandeur, becomes a reference to the power of visuals, of image, and glamour over the content of a political statement. In the triptych these two works and another called Cold (2019) are a formal investigation into image making practices. I would Like to Visit is a video art piece, whereas P is for Palestine is my fiction film, and Cold is my documentary. 

I'm dying to know - how cold was it when you shot Cold? The work for me was playful and painful at the same time. It’s so economical in its presentation of those two things - playfulness and suffering. At the end of the dialogue, in Arabic, after acknowledging the untenable position of both wanting to be cold and not wanting to be cold, you say that you're being forced to be cold, that someone else is responsible for your suffering. 

Earlier in the dialogue you explore your agency or choice in the matter. So, you talk yourself into a corner and the questioner exposes this contradiction in your behavior, but we understand the choice is yours, ultimately. Can you speak to these two themes in the work, to its pairing of freedom and determinism? 

That’s at the core of the work. The character frames themselves and the work ends with the character cutting the shot – asserting their choice to participate in this, or not. But then, what choice do they have not to? As an Arab person, as a person of color, the physicality of who this person is determines the character’s identity. It’s partly about how artists in general are forced to weaponize their identity or sell their suffering to be heard. For me as an artist who wants to talk about Palestine, about identity, about my own experiences, politics is important. In the work I’m not talking about politics abstractly, but through personal experience which is often the case for racialized or politicized people. They are obligated to talk about politics through their suffering under whatever systems. But I need to acknowledge that this is a choice, and that in this moment of determinism and bleakness, one has a choice to not participate. The work plays on the absurdity of that choice too. The dialogue is intentionally absurd and circular because it feels like you can't really explain it without sounding like the snake wrapped around everybody’s head. Yes, I have a choice, but I don't have a choice. 

It's a playful work too. You're having fun with the absurdity of the dialogue – in spite of the suffering at its center.

It needed to be real suffering. I needed to go on a really cold day. So cold I was messing up my lines. It had to be real pain because what is at stake in these themes is real violence, and to really represent it, it must be physical. But it also turns on an ethnographic gaze, and it’s a documentary. The violence within ethnography and documentary is taken up in the work – the observer only watches because there is suffering in the video, and pain. In the last year of a raging genocide, looking at all the people in Gaza who are filming their suffering and posting it online and just asking for people to be moved by it, asking people to look at it – again, I know it's a choice they're making, yet they also have no choice but to make those appeals. Those posts are absurd too - what kind of absurd mental state is required to broadcast one’s own suffering online in the hope that it will have a political effect that will in turn spare you from this suffering? That’s the absurdity, right? 

You must deny who you are because the moment you say who you are, you're controversial, and we can't have that.

We're reframing all this past work in terms of the media environment in the last year, in terms of the live streamed genocide in Palestine – even I Would Like to Visit. I'm sure you thought of it as a piece about digital communications and language then, but now it resonates chillingly with more horrifying posts from and about Gaza. 

Absolutely. And I think that the piece returns to that same desire because of a demand for neutrality – a demand that ends up erasing the entire statement in the work. The message currently is that I must erase who I am to be neutral and presentable in a public sphere. The violence of that is obviously incomparable to the real physical violence that's happening on the ground, but for a lot of us it’s so much more felt and extreme. You must deny who you are because the moment you say who you are, you're controversial, and we can't have that. You're not neutral. We can't have that, and so, we need to erase you. 

I'm reminded of something Said wrote in Orientalism (1979) where he's describing the personal dimension of his research project as a Palestinian-American, coming into his own in New York around the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and suddenly being perceived as a Palestinian. He says there was no dispassionate or neutral Palestinian position to occupy in conversations in the mainstream media about Palestine. You're describing the same problem. There's no way as a Palestinian to discuss the struggle without putting your suffering forward in that in that framing. And yet, there's a demand for neutrality.

Right. And I think that's why so much of that triptych is about language and communication. It's about me trying to wrap my head around that challenge of wanting to talk about it, but then not using a language that is really equipped to properly talk about it, because it comes with all these challenges. As a colonial language or as a foreign language, English is a signifier of cultural value. 

In Omar and Lawrence (2024) you're dealing with fiction film, but you make use of archival material and nonfiction material - interviews which are nevertheless very staged. You make the artifice of them very clear. There's a part at the beginning of Omar and Lawrence where in an interview Omar Sharif says: “I wish I could be real and not just a representation.” And then the recording cuts and Sherif collaborates with the interviewer to help her craft a perfect representation, or the one desired by the producers. He signals his willingness to help by inviting the crew to “remove what you don't like and you'll get the interview that you want.” There's a traffic in this between fiction and nonfiction, and elsewhere in the work. And that line is blurred as well in T.E. Lawrence's narrative of the Great Arab Revolt. Sherif’s film is an account of that episode in the story of Arab independence and anti-colonial struggle, but of course, it's a buddy film too and or a bromance between Omar Sharif's totally fictional character and Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. Tell me a little bit about your manipulations of the film. 

The aggressive editing style is about two things. It’s about me being transparent about manipulating the film, or the author telling you that I'm here. It refers to the work as a work. I'm interested in the idea that the work I'm showing is referring to the form and referring to the screen itself, or to the process itself. The work announces it is about filmmaking, but this is also a film. I'm not trying to suspend anyone's disbelief. On the contrary I'm pointing you to the form to say there is an author and a point of view to this. This form is not neutral. It doesn't just exist. I think this is a problem with some fiction film that hides its own artifice. Aggressive edits become a way to declare myself as the author and declare the form of the film. There are different manipulations - the cutouts, recording the screen, pixelation, etc. -  to remove the polish of the image and its bigness. People often remark on the beautiful scenery in Lawrence of Arabia - it's epic and big, and huge, and it is all those things. It’s also just beautifully shot. A lot of it is shot on location in Wadi Rum, in Jordan. For me, because I was born and raised in Jordan, and visited Wadi Rum repeatedly, it was interesting to see how it was filmed, and how the technical challenges of doing that were met. The cutouts almost became a way of removing that scenery. I wanted to focus on the characters and take a critical distance from the attraction of the film.

The cutouts have that effect. You make portraits of the characters. In the archival or media montage sections it seems like you're exposing a kind of deceitfulness in Sherif, the actor, or interrogating his character. You show him telling his name change story, and it's very clear that he's addressing himself to a Western audience and trying to make himself palatable for that audience. You're exposing that sort of opportunism or ambition in him. But sometimes you catch him in contradictions too. You show an excerpt from an interview where he says “Lawrence of Arabia was my first film,” and then you cut to a number of earlier films, Egyptian films, the Yussef Chahine (1926 – 2008) films with Faten Hamama (1931 – 2015). Could tell me about how you're representing that actor who wished to be real and not just a representation? Is this an honorific treatment of Sherif or a diminishing one, or a realistic and complex one?

That moment of him saying “you can cut” to the interviewer says something about his personality, but I used it as permission to do that as well. He just told me I can also edit and cut up his life and decide to make a version that I want. He was an icon to me growing up, but he's given me this opening to reconceive of his life now that I know a lot more about it after researching it. But it isn't flattering. I get that. And I think he's a complicated character for sure. My earliest memory of Sherif was watching TV in Jordan when he popped up on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I asked my mom who he is, since he has an Arabic name. And she's said “he's a traitor.” That captures what the film is about. I think for her generation, and as a Palestinian, she really saw this transition for him, how his politics around Palestine were disappointing, how he spoke out against Arab nationalism. And so, I think it’s a complicated representation. I don't think it's a positive one. I do try to not hide though, telling the story I want to tell. I think it goes back to the formal elements of the way I cut it, in heavy-handed style. It’s both an artificial version of Sherif, and a true version. One thing that carried over from the Omar and Lawrence project to Omar, What’s Good? (2024) is this idea of using fiction to tell a truth and using archiving and documentary to tell a fiction. Even though that's a fiction film, that's a real actor doing something on a real location. There's real labor involved. For me, Omar becomes a study of the perfect colonial subject, which is also what Edward Said calls him. I was reminded by a friend that Said refers in his memoir Out of Place to Sherif in several places - they went to the same school. He refers to him as a “bully” and also says Sherif represented the kind of authority that the school projected, like he really wanted to be a figure of authority that belonged to the school – a private, English colonial school. In the work he becomes a case study of the colonial subject, showing what that subject is willing to do, and what the price of this is. He did end up old and poor and not successful, chewed-up and spit-out by Hollywood after making a lot of bad films and regretting that he left his wife, Hamama, and his life in Egypt. The arc in the film is way too melodramatic, though, and it's a bit of a fiction in the sense that also his life wasn't that clear cut, ending neatly with a regret. 

You said the fiction has this truth-telling function and the archival material produces fictions in the film. You show a scene where Sherif gives a powerful monologue about how “Bahlool sold himself.” Immediately after you cut to interview footage where he voices these regrets the cost of pursuing fame in Hollywood. There's another part in Omar, What's Good? where an interviewer lists the kinds of characters Sherif had played – “a Russian poet,  a New York Jew,” etc. Shortly after this, you include clips of Sherif with Barbara Streisand in films and then at a fundraising event for the Israeli Defense Fund.

Right, then with Ariel Sharon and then singing the national anthem in Tel Aviv. 

It’s really well-documented then, Sherif’s opposition to Arab nationalism and sympathy for the Israeli government. Do you think it was an opportunistic kind of complicity, or, do you think he was indoctrinated and self-hating? 

I don't know if I can speak to his psychology. And I think in some ways the work is more interested in the public persona than the biography. Although the film does end with a personal reflection, the evidence shows he completely erased a big part of the history of Egyptian cinema that he was a part of. The story about his name is convoluted too, and it's a funny story considering his name was Michael. His birth name is Michael Shaloub. You think “Omar” is more easily pronounced than “Michael” for an English audience? Clearly this is a false story. The fact is he wouldn't have succeeded in Egypt with a name like Michael. His birth name signifies a Christian Lebanese background, and if you wanted to be famous in Egypt at the time, you had to present as Egyptian Muslim. The name-change story erases all the complexity of where he was coming from, what he was doing. In some ways it does read as self-hating. In some of the interviews he's basically reenforcing anti-Semitic stereotypes, but he’s allowed to – “everyone in Hollywood is Jewish.” At the same time he's conflating Zionism with Judaism, which is why I wanted to make that reference to Barbra Streisand. People had a problem with Sherif and Streisand’s relationship, but it wasn't because she was Jewish. It was because she has a well-documented history of being a really aggressive Zionist. He left Hamama for her - he leaves the darling of Egyptian cinema for Streisand. People are going to hate you. They're going to have problems with you. It looks aggressive. It looks like it's too much. Particularly if you're Palestinian or if you're someone who believed in Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism – Sherif was one of the few Arab actors known in the Western world and he was attacking Nasser. 

I want to return to a part of Omar and Lawrence where you show several interviews with other filmmakers, Julian Schnabel and others. And you include their film titles – all films by non-Arabs about Arabs, but sympathetic and critically acclaimed ones. It starts out as a kind of hat tip to these filmmakers who are making films about Palestine when it's very difficult to make sympathetic films about Palestine. Could you tell me about that move you make in the film?

Omar and Lawrence is about Lawrence of Arabia, but also about filmmaking and the film form and about the industry and storytelling. While I was editing that film, I thought about David Lean as a filmmaker who is telling the story of Lawrence - doing it historically and inaccurately, but still calling it a biographical picture. He invented “Sharif Ali” - Sherif's character is a character that doesn't exist in history. It’s completely fictitious. Also, I was thinking about Lowell Thomas (1892 – 1981), the journalist who knew of T.E. Lawrence as a storyteller as well. And here’s the reason for Edward Said’s interview part in the work - culture, narrative, and story in the film are a part of the empire and a part of storytelling. I wanted to bring that into the contemporary world and think about it, in relation to contemporary filmmaking. So, we start off with these filmmakers, and all these films I've come across either by just watching them or through my film programming work. They’re mostly on Palestine but one is about a young Somali woman who came into Europe as a refugee. For me they all display some empathy in their storytelling, like novels that for Said were trying to be critical of the empire, but just couldn't help but be part of the empire. The authors for Said, like these filmmakers, did not have the self-awareness to step outside of empire and so they really become that for me. When they approached these stories, they chose to see what they wanted to see. In editing this part and emphasizing their references to themselves in interviews, I choose to see what I wanted to see. I was linking that kind of storytelling that is part of the empire from Lawrence’s time into contemporary festival culture. 

When you cut up the interview material you extract the parts where the filmmakers are referring to themselves. The “I” moments and “me” moments and so on in the conversations. It reminds me of Said's technique of close textual analysis in Orientalism -  where he's behaving like a literary scholar with colonial texts and analyzing this appearance of personal pronouns and the locations of various authors in their texts, what he calls their “strategic location.” He's making the same point. You're doing what he does with the text as a filmmaker with dialogue. You’re zeroing-in on these positioned moments and egomaniacal moments in the scripts to show that these films are as much about the filmmakers as they are about any of the Palestinian subjects that they aim to represent sympathetically. One more question about some of the archival material or news media that you use in Omar and Lawrence toward the end. You show this strong parallelism between an exchange in Lawrence of Arabia with a British General about political and economic interests after the Sykes-Picot Agreement – an agreement between the British and French to carve up the region into protectorates upon the defeat of the Ottomans. So the question for the General is, “do you have any ambition in Arabia?” And then you cut to responses to the same question from Bush, Trump, Obama and Reagan. You're making a strong point about a continuity between the colonial history in the region and today. Can you comment on that?

Thank you. I think part of the whole impetus of Omar and Lawrence is really to take something that's in the canon, that's been glorified, and dragging it into the contemporary while thinking about how it’s still going on. It's about that continuity and trying to talk about history. People talk about things like they’re in the past, like they're done, that they're stopped and what I'm trying to do is just say no, this is continuous. It's happening now. 

I'm less curious about the representation of Arabs on screen, and more interested in seeing proactive, complicated stories being told by Arabs. 

I wanted to ask you about more recent appearances of Arabs in film. There was Valentino who played in The Sheik (1921) and the Son of the Sheik (1926) in early American films, and he was Italian-American. The first Arab in Hollywood film was Omar Sherif, whose story you've told and retold and thought quite a bit about. Now we're in a different moment, it seems. There are actors being cast in very interesting ways in films nowadays, Arab-American actors, a couple of them from the Arab American comedy scene, for instance. Stand-up comedians are finding dramatic roles like Rami Youssef and Dave Merheje, in Poor Things (2023) and Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023), respectively. These characters are complex. They're not stereotyped. Rami Malek is another example, cast as Freddie Mercury is the film on Queen. Do you have any thoughts on these more recent appearances of Arabs in films, dramatic films and TV?

There’s no doubt, we've changed. I find representation interesting to think about. But what's more interesting for me is what these public personas are allowed to say and not allowed to say. How vocal can you be as an Arab in the entertainment industry? There’s progress, though - more nuanced narratives and fully drawn characters. Mo, the Netflix comedy starring the Palestinian-American comedian Mohammed Amer is a unique case of a Palestinian character playing a Palestinian! But as an actor and a comedian he's been outspoken about Palestine whereas Rami Malek has been very silent. You can't assume that just because they're Arab, they somehow have good politics, right? We have a lot of examples of that, including Omar Sherif! Ramy Yousef has been more vocal but still careful, I think. It’s also interesting to see what kind of projects are being greenlit by Arabs, what kind of stories are they telling, and how many are actually telling stories and directing or writing. Independent filmmakers all around the world, not just in North America, and particularly in the Arab world are in a tight spot. They must depend on European funding a lot of the time, through co-production or outside funding because there isn’t much. I wonder what that kind of funding does to the narratives that we are seeing, what kind of representation. We're way past the tropes of Arab terrorists or screen villains. But now it seems if you're not the villain, then as an Arab actor or character you're a passive victim. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of victims that are being played and what does that mean? The public persona of Omar Sherif is troubling, but as much as I disagree with him, he's an active character, on and off screen. I'm less curious about the representation of Arabs on screen, and more interested in seeing proactive, complicated stories being told by Arabs. 

Yours included! You do activist work too, through your programming, and model your politics in an ethos of experimental filmmaking, far removed from the constraints imposed by Hollywood. So, it would seem there's a lot more permission for you to do brave work and to take strong positions, but you still come up against censorship. Why don't you tell me about the work you've done, controversially in some cases, with the collective Regards Palestiniens. 

Recently, we had a show in gallery spaces that I co-curated. But in all the programming and curating work I’m doing with this collective the aim is to show political work from the region. I don't think of myself as an activist at all. I really do think of myself as someone who is working within culture, within the cultural space and thinking about culture as a way to talk about politics and about social issues. I want to create spaces for dialogues. One of the things that I really like about working with Regards specifically is following the mandate, which I came into. It was created in dialogue, by a group of us, not by one person. After every screening there's always space to talk and think about what we've seen. It's not just about the experience of the film. In the past year and a half with the genocide in Israel, more so than ever, this really became very important for us - dialogue as an educational tool, and for the community to emotionally come together and grieve together and think. There were two incidents where we came up against problems of censorship just trying to show work and talk about it. The first was a screening of a Lebanese filmmaker's work as part of a series. We were doing these events at different venues in the city and one of them was Cinema du Parc in Montreal. At the last minute, on the day of the event, they canceled it citing “security concerns.” We were told that because the title of the series was “From the River to the Sea,” they were concerned about anti-Semitic messaging or hate speech. Interestingly, these films were super political and revolutionary films, but they somehow did not have a problem with the content of the film. Any reference to Palestine has become controversial. “From the River to the Sea” is about imagining a liberation of the entirety of Palestine, but this is perceived as a threat. The other experience was with the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia where we were invited to collaborate on a screening. The Concordia administration, again, last minute cancelled the screening. We were told that the event was one sided, and it seemed clear there was some donor pressure to have it cancelled. In both cases, big, supposedly liberal institutions which are meant to encourage experimental and political cinema failed. It is a horrifying moment of realizing that these institutions are progressive or liberal, but not on Palestine. There's so much fear about funding and where the money is coming from and trying to abide by donors’ and funders’ politics. Appeasing them at the expense of marginalized communities, morals and ethics is what we’re seeing. We’ve also been able to host countless successful and amazing events, to build a network and community. But yes, unfortunately, you keep on coming up against the censorship of Palestinian voices and allies of Palestinians too. In the case of the Ellen Gallery, this resulted in the firing of the director Pip Day by Concordia. Wanda Nanibush’s case at the AGO is another example but the list is growing. There's all this silencing that's been happening in the public sphere and it has a chilling effect. This is why I'm more interested in what the actors are doing with their platforms as opposed to what we're seeing on screen. Unfortunately, a lot of times you're seeing liberal representations of Arabs and Palestinians but then when it comes to the real politics you get silenced. I think we're now at a moment where the limitations of representational politics are becoming clear. We are seeing the limitations of DEI or Equity initiatives. They’re often not about the actual politics of anti-racism and decolonization, and so we’re starting to think more about what’s at the core of these institutions – not just in the language of a policy.