Al-Fajr Newspaper Co-Founder Now Accomplished Filmmaker

By Geoff Lumetta

Fellow Hollywood filmmakers tend to think Joan Mandell is either eccentric or obessessed when she tells them about her movies. They ask why a talented graduate of UCLA's film school isn't making the next "Jurassic Park" or writing the new Schwarzenegger action movie. Instead, her three films explore issues facing Arab Americans, Arab immigrants and Palestinians living in occupied territories. While none may be Hollywood blockbusters, all have portrayed Arabs in a way that few Americans have seen.

"Living in LA, a lot of people will tell you you shouldn't do this—you will have no career and you'll make no money," Mandell said. "But in the last couple of years I've realized this is what I want to do. I've been involved with these issues my whole life and I'm always motivated to tell these stories."

In her first two movies, Mandell told the story of life under Israeli occupation in "Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family," and covered the deportation trial of seven Palestinians charged in Los Angeles with membership in a terrorist organization in "Voices in Exile: Immigrants and the First Amendment." Her latest film, "Tales From Arab Detroit," is one of the first documentaries to center on Arab life in the United States.

"I do these movies because everyday I'm wondering why no one is speaking out on this issue or that issue," she said in an interview with the Washington Report. "I'm outraged or engaged, and I'm a filmmaker so I should be making films about it."

With these films on her résumé, people generally assume Mandell is either Arab American or an Arabic studies specialist. They are surprised to find out she is neither. Mandell, 42, grew up in Boston, where her first foreign exposure was a stamp collection she kept as a child. "I had all these wonderful and fascinating stamps from other countries," she said. "I wondered about the places they came from and I think that got me interested in other countries."

Mandell went on to attend McGill University in Montreal where she met students from all over the world. The atmosphere promoted discussions of international issues and she soon gained an interest in the Middle East. "In the beginning I guess I was just wondering how people there lived with all the wars and occupations," Mandell said. But her knowledge grew when she took a job at the Middle East Research Information Project (MERIP) just days after graduating from college in 1975. Although her major was in sociology, Mandell said she got an unofficial graduate degree in Middle East studies writing and editing papers at MERIP.

"Nobody Would Believe Me"

In 1978, she went to Birzeit University in the West Bank to teach English. There she experienced the tension and violence of occupation first hand. She came to know students and their families well enough to experience their frustration at living under arbitrary and sometimes cruel Israeli policies. That frustration increased when she returned home on visits to the United States and saw that people here knew little of events in the occupied territories. "Coming back to the U.S., I would talk about human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza and nobody would believe me," Mandell said. "They had never heard any of the details."

Mandell returned to Jerusalem wanting to communicate what she was seeing to the outside world. She found a way to do that through the English-language newspaper Al-Fajr (The Dawn). Mandell and two Palestinian journalists, Elias Zananiri and Hannan Siniora, started Al-Fajr, which was the only English-language newspaper published in the occupied territories. Despite heavy Israeli censorship, the paper covered the brutality of occupation as well as Palestinian life and culture.

While writing for Al-Fajr, Mandell was asked by a Swedish filmmaker, PeA Holmquist, to help him find sources for a documentary he planned to produce in Gaza. Mandell knew a family that exemplified the tenacity and hardship of refugee life: the Dimrawi family in the Jabalya refugee camp. She slowly became more involved in the project and soon the Swedish filmmaker asked her to co-direct "Gaza Ghetto" despite the fact that she had no experience making films.

"I became a journalist without going to journalism school, I became a filmmaker without going to film school and I became a Middle East specialist without a Ph.D.," Mandell joked. "Most of my training has been out there in the real world."

The film went on to win the grand prize in Italy's prestigious Festival dei Popoli and, after a tour of Europe, Mandell took the film around the United States for a year and a half showing it at colleges, small towns and big cities. She often gave lectures and answered questions about the film after the showing, which gave her the chance to hear reactions from the audience. "In Europe everybody saw the film and said 'so what' because they've known what was going on in Gaza for years," Mandell said. "In the United States though, there was a lot of backlash, a lot of people said the film was one-sided or biased. Others were just surprised to see what was happening."

It didn't take long for Mandell to realize, however, that films such as "Gaza Ghetto" were not going to be widely embraced. "Sometimes I'm hesitant to tell people the titles and the subjects of my films," she said. "I've been at parties where people just walked away as soon as I told them about my films. It's sometimes very difficult to take them out and show them."

After seeing how difficult it was to promote "Gaza Ghetto," Mandell decided that she needed the clout and the contacts that a prestigious film school would give her. She enrolled in the film program at the University of California at Los Angeles despite being one of the only students there who had already directed an award-winning film. Again, most of her colleagues told her to abandon Arab issues and make more profitable mainstream movies.

She was almost ready to take this advice when eight resident aliens, all but one of them Palestinian, were arrested in Los Angeles and charged with membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They were later cleared of all charges but the case raised deep questions about the rights of legal aliens in the United States. "The case against the 'L.A.8' was so ridiculous, I just couldn't let it go by without saying something about it," Mandell said. The result of her work, "Voices in Exile," was aired on a number of PBS affiliate stations and it won an award at the New York Expo of Short Film & Video in 1989.

After two highly political films, Mandell was delighted when the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Dearborn, MI asked her to make "Arab Detroit." The 45-minute film focuses on the lives of a handful of Arab-American immigrant families and shows the generational and cultural conflicts they face in the United States. The movie explores the social and cultural realities Arab Americans face without discussing ethnic or political conflicts. Mandell said it was refreshing to abandon political themes for this project. "I wanted to do a film that would be easy for any Arab American to give to a neighbor who wanted to know about Arab culture," Mandell said. "Children could watch it in school and there would be no fear of retribution or an attack on Arab students."

Mandell said that her political movies often cause people to take sides and defend their positions instead of listening to new ones. She hopes that, instead of separating people, "Arab Detroit" will bring them together and possibly help them identify with Arabs and Arab culture. "A lot of the problems they are talking about in the film are faced by everyone, not just Arabs," Mandell said. "I hope it will be a good way to get the discussion going."

"Arab Detroit" was featured at the Middle East Studies Association conference in December and won the Award of Excellence from the Society of Visual Anthropology for its study of ethnicity. (See July/August 1995 Washington Report for a full review of the film.)

For her next project, Mandell plans to remain with cultural themes. She currently is working on a film about the keffiyeh and how it has evolved from a simple headdress to a symbol of Palestinian resistance and even into a fashion item that many non-Arabs are wearing. "I know it's a strange idea and people tell me it's eccentric and that I shouldn't do it," she said. "But these are the kinds of films I want to make. It's what I love doing."

For information on ordering Mandell's films, call Olive Branch Productions at (310) 444-9715.

Geoff Lumetta is the features editor of the Washington Report.