As there is a review to follow during the Femme Filmmakers Festival, I am not going to delve too deeply in how first-rate the beautiful Salam is. A short film set in New York about a Palestinan girl. Director, Claire Fowler, and I, finally managed to collide our busy schedules so I could pick her talented brains and basically tell her we are not worthy. And by the time we had said our goodbyes, I was fully aware that the insightful filmmaker also has a compassionate, smart head on her shoulders.
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Robin Write: So a question one of my team (Jasmine May) wanted me to ask. It’s quite a complex question, so we’ll start with that. What is the is one past memory or an event or a dream that you’ve had, good or bad, that you could visualize on film?
Claire Fowler: I mean, there’s a ton of things. I’ve never made a film about me directly, like, hey this is my life, biographical. But there’s always little things I take that kind of find their way in. And projects that I’ve written that haven’t been made, stuff like that.
I was making a documentary about ten years ago in Palestine. They obviously have a bunch of checkpoints that you have to pass through, pretty much anywhere that you’re traveling in the West Bank. There’s just no freedom of movement there. And I remember I was going from this little village – which is almost like an island, because it’s been completely surrounded by the Israeli wall – and there’s only one road that leads in and out of it. And basically it’s manned by a checkpoint.
I remember one day I was coming to that checkpoint, with the Israeli soldiers. And I was just trying to film the people. It was something that happens every single time. You’re at the checkpoint, and people inevitably are left waiting and sweating in the heat, for no reason other than they just want to make them wait and sweat. And this is kind of causing the oppression.
I was with this mother who was trying to take her kid to Jerusalem for treatment. For kidney failure, for dialysis. I was trying to film her, and we were going through this checkpoint. There was like zero tolerance to filming, even though there’s no official law that says so. It’s like a public property. But the IDF decided that they can’t have anyone filming, for security reasons.
So they pulled me aside, and they wanted me to show them what I had been filming. I’d been filming in NTSC format. I switched it to PAL, so that when they press play they wouldn’t be able to see anything. But they kept doing it – they didn’t understand video. So we would do this for about 45 minutes, going through this processes. And then finally he said to me, okay, so either you send me what you just filmed, or I’m taking not only your tape but also your camera.
And at that point I was like, fuck this. I didn’t get great footage anyway. I just want to get out of here. I’m with this lady and her son, and she just wants to get out of here. He can have the fucking tape. So I just got up and was packing up my stuff. And he said, How long are you in Israel for? And I was like, another three weeks. And he said, Well, I think someone should show you the other side of Israel. And he was asking me out on a date.
What? Wow.
And I thought, you know what, I’m just going to meet up with this guy in a public place in Tel Aviv, and see. Just for the whole story of it. See what he has to say about this whole situation, and maybe it could even be part of my documentary. And he had nothing interesting to say at all! It was literally just an excuse to try and get me to go on a date with him. One of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me – kind of hilarious and tragic at the same time.
So you’ve kind of touched on it already. I suppose you’ve obviously got a huge interest in the culture. So why that culture, personally, in your film, Salam?
Two reasons, really. So when I was in my twenties, my brother, who’s a nurse, was volunteering for this organization that provides health care for Palestinian kids. He offered my services as a filmmaker to them. So I ended up making two documentaries for this organization, and making Palestinian friends, and seeing the town. The effects of the occupation on the Palestinian people, and the health access. Just everyday life out there.
So it was something that I definitely had strong feelings about. The last time I was there, ten years ago, I was leaving the village that I was staying in – the one with the Israeli wall around it. I’d become quite good friends with the English teacher, and she said to me, I think you’re going to leave, and you’re going to forget about us.
And that made me really sad. It’s a very kind of fatalistic view that Palestinians have. This kind of safe, almost pessimistic view of the world. Because of the situation that they’re in. So I always knew that in some way I wanted to either go back and make another documentary in Palestine, or in make a film that had a Palestinian character. And Salam is Palestinian, but she’s from Syria.
The second reason was that in 2016 when I wrote this script, we had the presidential elections going on in the States, and it was just crazy. We all could see this kind of change happening in 2016 in the lead up to the election. Even though most liberals and most educated people in those pockets of educated areas like New York and L.A. didn’t believe that Trump would ever win.
I don’t know, because of the Brexit vote earlier that year, I had this horrible, horrible feeling that he would win. And there was already a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment. So I started writing Salam.
I started writing a script that would portray an Arab character, a Muslim character, not even in a sympathetic light. I just wanted to represent a character who I could be friends with, who seemed like the friends that I had made in Palestine. Just an everyday character. I really wanted to represent the specific troubles that an immigrant from the Middle East could be experiencing. And I wanted to show solidarity with the immigrants, many specifically being targeted by Trump.
Salam opens in that kind of exposed, vivid world of New York City, and then the more intimate family setting. It’s like the idea you want us to picture the outside world and the private life. Did you want the audience to make that contrast?
Yeah. I wanted the film to open, and for it to be immediately obvious that this was set in New York. It was really important to me to show a home life, because the Palestinian home life was something that I had been exposed to. They are very warm, very family oriented, very funny. It’s very real, the kids are running around, just a regular family life. And it was really important to me to show this person, who was wearing a headscarf, that is stigmatized so much in American society, and just the relationships that she had. And how warm and how strong they were.
Do you get a few people, because of your background in the UK and America, asking you why you are making this film?
Yeah. But I’d say nobody has been rude about it. People from the Middle East that have come to my screenings, some have made a specific point of coming up to me and talking to me about it. Saying that they really like the film, and they were really happy with the portrayal of Salam and the family life. One Syrian woman said that it really very reminiscent of that life – which was really nice.
Did you have a different ending in mind? Did you have other ways you wanted to close the film?
I never wanted to because I felt like it was too easy to make this film a tragedy. And I felt like the Palestinians have experienced enough tragedy. I should be leaving this particular character with just a spark of hope.
We’ll talk about the actress. I mean, how did you cast Salam? What exactly were you looking for?
Hana [Chamoun] actually looks really stunning in the film. I wanted someone who looked like a normal person, who didn’t look like a model. I do think Hana’s a very beautiful person, but I also think she’s an interesting looking person. She doesn’t necessarily look like an actress in the same way that a lot of American actors do. She’s Palestinian, Lebanese and she also has an American passport cause she has an American grandmother. She’s a very international person.
A lot of the casting was really just about looking at feature films and short films that had been made in the last few years. And Googling the cast, finding out where they were based or who represented them. It was a lot of research. A lot of directors will go to those big agencies and get a book of the actors they represent. That’s not going to represent a Palestinian woman. And they don’t really. So it was a lot of personal research.
The manager of this girl who was not available said, Hey, do you know this other girl? And then she sent me the link to Hana. She had not done a huge amount of acting. She just graduated from the Strasberg Institute for acting in New York. And she’d acted in her mom’s film, it was just like a tiny clip of her that I was able to find. In the film, her sister dies and Hannah reacts to it. It was just like a five second clip, but she could act!
I loved the way she looked. Hana’s also young and she’s cool. Which is why she’s into hip hop, and wearing those cool jeans and Converse. And that was really important to me, because I see a lot of those kind of Muslim women in and around New York, and I don’t see a lot of them on-screen.
I thought Hana was terrific. I liked the change in her behavior, like within the family unit, when she goes outside and has that pensive moment. How she is with the passengers, and then how she is with the young woman that she meets. Quite abrupt when she is offended, and then kind of let’s her barrier down. That scene where she turns her head, and the tear down her face. Wonderful.
I think Hana – and all of the actors in the movie – brought a lot of themselves to the script. If they didn’t think something would work, or they questioned something, and that’s kind of being a director. You’ve got to open yourself up to being questioned by actors, because you know. They really need to understand the character and what the character is doing. So it’s always a really collaborative process.
One more question. Similarly, how did you acquire some of the exceptional technical crew? The cinematography is so good. As is the editing. How did you get that team together?
I’ve worked with Nick [Nicholas Bupp], the cinematographer. And Alec [Styborski], the editor. I met those two on the same project. Back in 2015, I was at the American Film Institute doing this directing workshop for women.
So I actually met Nick because he had just graduated from AFI as a cinematographer, and he found out that I was doing the program. I think he was seeing all of the women who would go onto the program and seeing which ones he felt like he had the kind of aesthetic affinity with. And he liked my work. So he actually reached out to me. He used to work in the electrical department. And actually, apart from being a really nice guy, really talented guy, that was one of the things that really swung it for me, because he had knowledge of how to light, like an intricate knowledge. And I ended up just loving working with him.
And the same with Alec. He was in New York, so when I was living in New York. I went to L.A. to make this film, and then I desperately wanted to get out as fast as possible. It was really expensive. So I went back as soon as I could to New York, so I could get a job and make some money. So a few friends just put me in touch with different people. And Alec had not really edited very much at all, but he was just a really nice person, and he had assistant edited on tons and tons and tons of projects. So we worked together, really liked each other. And so that was that.
