Hey, everyone, many here.

No such thing is actually off this week, but don't worry because we still have something for you to listen to.

This week, we're hosting an episode of Origin Stories, a new show from Campside Media.

Every week, on Origin Stories, veteran journalist Matthew Cher talks to a writer or a director about a project close to their heart.

On this week's Origin Stories, Matthew talks to a Palestinian filmmaker who uses his mother's old home video footage to tell a story about what it was like to live in the West Bank during the Second Intifada.

No such thing will be back next week, but in the meantime, enjoy this episode of Origin Stories Campsite Media.

Suha films everything, birthdays, bedtime routines, Chris mess and holidays.

She lives in the West Bank with her husband and two young children.

She's got a relatively comfortable middle class life, but all that changes in the early two thousands during what's known as the Second Intofada, a mass Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.

When Israel launches a round of retaliatory attacks, Suha does what she's always done.

She picks up her camera and films it all, the barrages of bombs, the late night sheltered in the basement, her children's panic, and somehow even in the middle of it all, Suha captures an intimate and truly remarkable portrait of life under siege.

Nearly two decades later, her son Yusef, finds the home video footage.

Yello Jima read great dim yellah habit is up.

There are some, Yusef, for some the iraland wish, for some the ertanic bar suit.

I would look at myself and I would just see two empty black holes as I was hearing my mom described me as a child the same way that I saw myself in my most vulnerable moment that killed me.

And he decides to finish the story his mother started.

She's like, when I was filming it, I hope that one day we could share it with the world.

And I told her, well, I think that day has come.

That's this week on Origin Stories.

Welcome back to Origin Stories.

Today we're going to be talking to Yusef Cheruzi, the award winning documentarian.

Yusef grew up in Palestine but left when he was young and finished high school in Qatar.

Studied Economics at the University of British Columbia.

He's also got a master's in development economics from Berkeley.

He did not take the traditional route to filmmaking, in other words, but about six years ago he and a friend, Mary el Ollentine, began assembling a documentary about Yusef's time during the Second Intafada, the years long Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

As source material, they used hours of home footage captured by Yusef's mother, of the family attempting to survive in a time of pitched conflict.

It's a beautiful documentary.

There's fear and anguish, but also real joy, real love, and above all the sense that life doesn't stop in battle.

He carries on one way or another.

Three Promises won the Harrald Award for Best Documentary at the nineteenth annual Camden Film Festival, and was also a finalist for the twenty twenty five Henry Award for Public Interest Documentary at Harvard.

Yusef, Welcome to Origin Stories.

Thank you, Matt, thank you for having me.

I want to start here with the unconventional path to this documentary.

So we're dealing with footage that is old, that was captured a while back, and in the meantime, after this footage is captured, you go off and have a different kind of career.

Talk to me about when you make this decision.

Okay, I've got this amazing footage here and I want the world to see it.

It was about fifteen years from the events until I found the footage again.

So we had left Palestine in two thousand and three, and in twenty eighteen, as you mentioned, I was doing my masters at Berkeley.

I had met Mary Elle there and she had background in filmmaking, and she had grown up in a pro Palestinian family, so she was excited to meet someone who grew up in Palestine and was asking me questions about my time living in the Second End to father.

So that triggered some of my own questions that I had for my parents, unanswered questions that I grew up with and haven't thought about in many years.

I was visiting my parents, we were out for dinner, and I started asking my dad specifically, just as a young man, and I was curious, you know, what it was like being a father, a man in his early thirties going through such a thing, and he was like, we have footage of that, and my mom was not happy at the time that he mentioned it.

I was shocked.

I was like, what do you mean, we have footage.

So as soon as we went home, my dad had already digitized a lot of our home video footage from the nineties and the early two thousands, So we put in the DVD player, it off and just five minutes into watching it, and you know, for those who have seen the film, it was that footage when we were me and my sister and my father were hiding in my grandparents' basement where it was safer and having our interactions, and just seeing five minutes of that scene, I immediately felt an obligation, really deep down that I have to share this.

It's so rare to see such intimate moments in a war zone, you know, in a family that, for better or worse, can be universally related to So I immediately asked my dad if I could have all of the footage, and I told my mom, I'm going to take this back to California with me and I am gonna make a movie out of it.

And that's how it started.

And I took it back to Maryelle.

The first thing I had to do was translate all of it, put the English subtitles, and watch all the hours that we had of footage.

He said, if I want to ask you about the fact that your family had all this foot and was recording in this way, which strikes me as unusual at the time.

Now, we film everything, you know, when I look through my phone, I film every aspect of my life.

But this was a time before we started doing that.

So what was it that drove your mother to make these recordings.

I've asked my mother this question, and she said that at the time she felt that maybe one day she could share our story with the world.

She mentions this in the film as well.

You know, the news media weren't really speaking about what was happening in the second in Fada back then, and there was no social media, so if you don't watch al Jazeira Arabic specifically, you have no idea what's happening.

So you know, she felt an obligation to pick up the camera on film.

But from my perspective as well, you know, we've always filmed.

I had more hours of footage in the nineties, like pre into Fodo.

Then I could count because my parents filmed everything.

They filmed every birthday, every Christmas, every event, every time our friends came over from school and we were playing.

And I don't know where that came from.

I mean my grandfather, my dad's dad, also filmed a lot, and he had a huge archive.

He's from Nazareth and kept old pictures of Nazareth from pre nineteen forty eight, from pre the state of Israel, and had them all organized in folders and was using Dropbox in like twenty ten as like an eighty ninety year old man.

Maybe it's in the genes or in the household that my parents grew up around.

But the camera was always there when we were kids.

When you looked back and started watching these all again, obviously remembered a lot of what had happened.

But was it different than what you remembered.

Was there a gap between what was in your head from these experiences and what you saw on film?

Lesser than I would have liked, to be honest, I started to question if these memories that I have of the second and to Faddos are memories that I made up or that I dramatized.

You know, memories tend to shape and get reshapen over the years, but the footage definitely provided validation for my memories that I think gave me more power to move on and it gets stronger because I stopped questioning whether these were just silly imaginations of a child.

Do you have kids yourself now?

No, I can't imagine.

When I watched the documentary, the most immediate visceral thought was thinking about what your parents must have felt, because when you're a parent, you want to shield your kid from everything, right, and like the most horrifying parts of this documentary to me were when you were scared or children were scared.

There's like a rawness to it that is really remarkably terrifying to me.

Yeah, and this became more clear to me not only through talking to my mom, but also more recently since the war in Gaza started and the more recent like Eron Israel war that was happening when on the daily we're hearing and feeling missiles being dropped, like Tel Aviv is just outside my window, I can see it.

I grew up feeling maybe deep down that the decision to leave Palestine that my parents took was taken without my consent, and now I'm back here in Palestine and I'm going through that same process of oh do I leave?

Do I stay?

But if I leave, you know, there's the community, and there's all of this that we've been building for so long, and all of this effort that we've been trying to do.

And that's exactly the same reasoning that my mom was going through.

But then on top of that, she had kids, all right.

So I'm sitting here going through my own anxiety in this decision making process, and then I remember my mom and I remember, Oh, thank god I don't have kids, because this would be hell.

This would be hell.

I can't even begin to imagine what it's like.

But you know, makes me more grateful for the decisions they did make.

Did you have to take time when you were watching the footage?

I mean, I'm assuming this is a pretty heavy emotional thing to watch, even though you do remember it.

How did you do it?

Did you watch them alone?

Did you watch them with Maryelle?

Did you watch them with family?

Well?

I watched them alone.

There was about five or six hours of footage from the Intafad period, So I sat through that took me about three months to go through all of it translated and subtitle it, so I watched every scene possible more than once in that process.

At first, I wouldn't be able to watch more than an hour at a time without stepping outside, taking a breathe there, crying a little bit, sometimes smoking a cigarette, grabbing a beer, doing what I need to do to get back to it.

It slowly got easier, and I started seeing more of the beauty in what was happening, rather than it still validating these early childhood emotions that I have still in me.

So once I got past that, I'm like, what a beautiful family, And despite everything that's happening, you know, I'm so lucky that this is me and that's my mom, and that's my dad, and that's my sister.

And it makes me so proud and to see that.

Because there's a lot of beautiful and funny and wholesome moments, but there were some things that soothly killed me on the inside.

I mean, you know, there was that scene in the trailer as well, where my mom describes the moment where I lost my childhood.

She describes me as like a face with two empty eyes, like black holes soul.

Thessize that's how she saw me.

Me and my mom during my teenage years, we didn't have the best relationship, and I went through a really rough period depression and dealing with PTSD and things like that.

And when I would look in the mirror during that time, that's how I would see myself.

And I never shared that with anybody.

I would be scared to look at myself in the mirror because I would look at myself and I would just see two empty black holes as eyes.

And then the first time hearing my mom described me as a child the same way that I saw myself in my most vulnerable moment, that killed me.

I started crying immediately, and I called my mom and I told her.

I fully believe that the passage from childhood to adulthood involves some hardening of the soul or something like that.

I've heard it described in different ways.

It's like you stop believing everything that you're told.

You lose a vulnerability, I guess is the way to put it.

And it's a remarkable and terrifying moment because I have kids.

I just kept putting myself in your parents' shoes and thinking like, what a horrible thing to experience, which also made me curious when you said I've been looking through these and I want to make them public.

Was your family ever like maybe not?

Maybe?

Wait No, my mom at first didn't really believe me.

And I know this because when we got our first grant and I told her, She's like, oh, so this is really happening.

I'm like, yeah, I've been working on this for a year.

So at that point I had to back down with her and be like, are you sure that you're okay with this?

And she's like, when I was filming it, I hope that one day we could share it with the world.

And I told her, well, I think that day has come.

And later on in the process, she had some concerns that she might come off as a bad mom, that she could have done more to pretec all of her insecurities came up.

But there was a lot of conversations obviously off camera between me and my mom about that and me reassuring my mom like, you're a superstar, Like you're the best mom I could have ever asked for.

That, Like, if we left earlier, you don't know what would have happened.

Then if we stayed longer, you don't know what would have happened, and we are where we are today because of your decisions.

Once you started getting love from the audience's, her confidence came back.

I have a logistical question, which is this.

You're trained in a totally different discipline.

You came up in a different world.

Is there a point when you sat down and like, I'm going to teach myself how to make a documentary?

Did you download software and start to teach yourself how to use it?

How did you go about this process?

Yeah, exactly that I download a premiere pro and figured it out.

I mean, it doesn't take that much to do the very basics, right.

I knew at some point I would have to hire someone that actually knows what they're doing to do the final touches.

But I can slice up scenes and put them in the order that I think makes the most sense in terms of story and narrative structure and things like that.

So for me, the vision was keeping get as raw as possible and just showing insight into what it's like living in a war zone.

So I was like, Okay, this is a good scene.

I could follow it with this scene eventually came up with a rough assembly by myself, but then after that, our editor took it to the next level.

I love her for all her patients as well, because I went out to New York.

She's based in Brooklyn.

I stayed there for two weeks and we were working daily, and you know, she would tell me Jacob and Elka and whatever, and I don't know what she's saying on teaching me how to do it, teach me how to do it.

And she had the patients to be like, oh, this is what this means, and this is what that means, and this is how you do that.

Okay, Yeah, And did you have touchstones from other documentaries that you admired, Were there TV docs or movies they were like, this is my tone or this is the approach I want to take.

Five Broken Cameras always came to mind, just it being the only other Pelscee film about the second and to Fada, as well as for Samma about the Syrian War Civil War.

For Sama was you know, definitely like a goal for me.

Right.

That's when she's talking to her daughter.

Right, exactly right.

So it's this mom and her husband is a doctor in the hospital and the mother is filming everything and her husband is one of the last to stay when the Russians start bombarding the city and they have this baby born during the war, and then they immediately leave the country.

So her story is written like a letter to her daughter explaining why they had to leave and why they had to let go of their home, and it was so powerful, and to me, I was like, I'm in a position here to write the follow up to that.

I mean years later, when Semma isn't a baby, you know, I was twenty six when I started working on this.

Other than those two Nelson Kristen, who both worked on Midnight Traveler and Camera Person and other documentaries that kind of have a similar tone, we were lucky the s film and the Catapult program and then later the Gotham Institute connected us with mentors that relate to the aesthetic of our film or the message of our film.

So I was very lucky to have access to those people and get feedback from them as well.

At what point do you start needing financial support?

So you decide you're going to start to do this, You're coming through the videos, you start talking to your mom, and then at some point you're like, okay, this has to become real, and you apply for the was the Catapult grant where you started.

Yeah, and it was about ten thousand dollars.

I mean, we used most of that money to set up the business, you know, do some of the legal as well as do a professional restoration and digitization of the original tapes because we wanted to make sure that the audio was really good.

That ten thousand dollars kept us going.

We eventually got grant funding from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and then we also got in kind services from different pitch events.

Right, we got one at the Malmo Arab Film Festival at that Man International Film Festival in Jordan.

But we eventually had to do a crowdfunding campaign on Seedent's Park and luckily we raised more than we expected.

That was to pay the editor.

She offered us half her rate on which she would usually charge.

Obviously not going to expect someone to work on this for free, so we had to raise money to pay for that because she was working on it for two three months editing, and it's not cheap.

Editors are not cheap, especially editors in the US.

And you're working at the same time.

I'm assuming you and Mary all are both have day jobs.

Yeah, exactly, so would you do this at night?

I worked out with a time difference, right because my team was all in New York.

So come seven pm my time, they're working on things.

I'm following up with them on what's happened on email.

And we had a weekly calls to catch up on everything, and then me and Mattot would She would send over like clips or things that she's edited, and you know, I'd give her feedback.

But eventually got to the stage where like, okay, for us to get to the finish line, yusef and note need to sit down together there and do it.

So I took two weeks off work and flew out to New York and just spent it looking over her shoulders.

So this is your first time making a film like that?

In your head, if you were wound to the time when you have had those two weeks in New York, what was the finish line in your head?

How did you envision it?

At that time?

We had approximately an eighty five minute film, and I never really gave myself a time limit, but I knew it was too long.

My goal was I need at least fifteen minutes gone.

There are scenes that are boring and I don't know why or where, but I am getting bored.

I don't want anyone to get bored.

I want people to leave wanting more.

I wanted people to finish the film and have to breathe.

You know, are you're watching the credits and you use that time to just like zone out and breathe.

That's the feeling that I wanted.

And she worked her magic.

She brought it down to seventy five and then and fifty five minutes.

She was pushing for the fifty five.

I was pushing for the seventy five.

We landed on the sixty one minute, mostly because for film festivals we needed to be sixty minutes to be considered a feature.

It can't be under an The forty to.

Sixty minute range is nonexistent in film festivals.

If you're over forty, you're too long for a short, and if you're under sixty, you're too short for a feature, so you get lost.

Welcome back to Origin Stories.

Today, we're talking to Yusaf Shrewzy about his documentary Three Promises.

I want you to tell me a little bit about the distribution strategy.

So you make the film, at what point do you start thinking about Okay, I've made this thing.

I'm making this thing that I love.

Now I'm going to need people to hear it.

At what point in the process do you start thinking about who's going to distribute it.

It was the Gotham Institute.

We had a fellowship with them, so they had a week long program that was dedicated to distribution and sales for first time filmmakers.

Was perfect.

I didn't even know the levels of bureaucracy and confusion.

I just thought you could just get an agent and they'll sell it for you.

I'm not proud to say this, but I am happy to say that I dumped that on Maryelle.

I'm like, hey, you're the producer.

I have no idea what's going on here.

Because when we first started working on it, she asked me, what do you want to do with this.

I'm like, I don't know, just put on YouTube.

And she's like, no, you're not going to do that.

So she started applying to the grants and to the festivals, and we won't take into distribution.

You know.

She was already plugged into the network.

So she had some names that she thought would like this film, and we were reaching out.

We got a lot of Oh, this is a beautiful movie, but we're not going to take it.

In North America.

No one was touching our film.

We got a lot of great feedback from all the big names, small names, independent names, but no one wanted to sell it.

In the Middle East.

We early on got a distribution deal from friends that we met through the Man International Film Festival and the Melmo Arab from Festival, and they were supported from the beginning.

So I trusted them that they'll do their best, and they did.

They put it up on the largest local streaming platform, and now Watermelon Pictures has done the same for us in North America.

Thank god.

Well, let's address the elephant in the room, which is that the people were nervous probably distributing a movie that touches on the Middle East conflict in any way.

Right, it's a third rail.

I completely understand that.

I just worked so hard on making this film apolitical.

We don't talk about why the NDI thought is happening.

We don't mention Israel in depth.

There are no normative statements happening about the occupation.

You're simply living with a family going through a war zone, and it's like even that you're Scared to Touch were released in March twenty twenty three and Warren Gaza started and it started getting a lot more interest from festivals all over the world.

Listen, maybe my film's not that good, fine, right, but no other land just want an Oscar and they don't have a distribution company.

That's insane.

It depresses me the way that this topic, in any form of journalism people worry about touching it in any way.

The preconceptions, the loadedness of it scares people, and I understand why.

But it also this makes me, from a journalist's perspective, that there's stories that are probably going unheard or untold or undistributed because of people's fear.

And yeah, I mean to your point, I would never say this is a political movie.

It's a movie about a family and what life is really like in these situations, which to me again is the most astonishing part of it.

We're so used to be bombarded with images of the worst atrocities that one can imagine on social media, and for me, one effect is that it flattens my thinking about what's happening in Palestine to pure destruction, which, of course on one level it is, but there's also a fact in which life does have to carry on.

People still have to exist in some way, and we never get to see that those aren't the images that we see.

And that's what I found so moving about it.

Families still have to exist, they have to move around, and they have to be families.

Agree, And I think as important as it is that these images that we're seeing that are coming out of these places, because I do think that with the over influx of photos and videos that are coming out of places like us, and the limitations or the fears that we were just speaking about in journalism circles and documentary circles and film circles is slowly dwindling because at some point you have to face the elephant in the room, right like when the elephant is that big.

But it does kind of desensitize us a little bit and makes it hard to continue watching because it's not even possible to process five second clip of someone picking up pieces of their baby.

I'm sorry, but I know this from deep within my heart that the film's coming out of the Gazen people, where whatever their future looks like in the next five ten years are going to be a killing And I really hope that by then the world is ready to watch them and to support them and to distribute them.

I suspect they will.

What I I hope that people would get out of a movie like yours is you know, you can understand through one family's experience, and it doesn't have to be like a pure catastrophe.

It doesn't have to be the kind of images that we get bombarded with on TV.

Now you can feel how the enormity of a conflict in a much more subtle way, which is what makes the movie so successful.

To me, I appreciate that.

I want to ask you a little bit about the film festival's circuit and the kind of reactions you've got.

You were all over the world, right, you probably don't know, but how many festivals and screenings do you think you had?

More than I could count and in countries all over the world.

I mean, the one that was a smack to the face was the DMZ Film Festival between North Korea and South Korea.

There's a city there on the border and my film was playing there, And how the did my film get all the way there?

You know?

Yeah, No, I've been so grateful for the film of all life that my film had.

Had Did people see the movie and the way that you thought they would see the movie?

In other words, this is so personal and you have so much wrapped up in it, and you created it.

When people were watching it and asking you questions or commenting on it, were there surprises and how they saw it?

Or was it what you expected?

The surprises came when I noticed people were seeing beyond basic questions.

The usuals are how I came to make this film and how I felt making the film, why my mom was filming in questions about my mom, and then my sister is freaking out the most, how is she?

When I got questions that where people saw beyond that was where I really felt like, oh wow, I don't know who you are.

You live in a country halfway across the world, and you're seeing that which I intended for people to see.

Little things about my dad, for example, like my dad reading Harry Potter to us and kind of his role and most people don't catch that right, but few fathers out there did because they were paying closer attention to what my dad was doing.

But what surprised me the most was I did not receive a single negative comment or any type of passive, aggressive or anything that was just pure love and support, especially in North America.

A True False Film festival was where it really hit me.

It's like a college town, like an hour's drive from Saint Louis, I mean, Jesus country, right like Billboard's saying, Jesus will save you and call this number and Jesus will answer, and you know the Trump flags.

Not only did everyone there know who I was, which felt really weird because it was a very small, intimate festival, but they were all so supportive, and all these old white Americans who were like locals from Missouri coming and having in depth conversations with me about it and clearly very propousity, various empathetic to me.

That was mind chattering.

They did have a security detail for me at that festival because they were getting some threats, but if they hadn't told me, I wouldn't have noticed.

You've made a massively successful documentary.

You're back in Palestine.

Are you making something now?

Are you working on a new documentary or was this a one thing you just wanted to try it and now you're going to go back to your day job.

I've been focusing on my day job since we released the film more than anything, and I don't think it's the end of my storytelling career.

I don't know how I feel about filmmaking again.

I'm definitely open to using that medium.

I have more stories to tell.

I have my grandparents' stories to tell as well that they've archived and they've written in places, and I'd love to find ways to share them in the future.

But I don't like to depend on the creative process for my income.

Let's put it that way.

When it becomes a need for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.

And I feel that way about everything really.

But the last few years I've been focusing on the startup here of a consulting company and a nonprofit like think tank.

Me and my partner is locally.

A lot of work has been putting into that.

You know, we're really trying to give back to the community and to build a progressive base for Palestinian news, to empower them and hopefully see change in the future.

But with the current situation, it's hard to tell what tomorrow holds.

I know for a fact I'll be back to storytelling, though sooner or later.

Yes, do you think of three promises as a political movie.

Not at all.

Like I said, it's a film about a family living in a war zone, and it just so happens to be a Palestinian family living in Palestine under Israeli occupation.

That's facts, it's not politics.

I asked, because I am so curious about the fate of storytelling that feels at all political in this day and age.

So a little bit of what I was talking about earlier, where anything that even touches on something that can say that are third rail gets judged before it comes out.

This is true not just of the conflict in Palestine.

It's true of American politics when it comes to Trump with domestic terrorism.

You know, it's like there's certain topics that are very hard to reach people with.

You can make it, but will people actually consume it.

So I wonder if you have suggestions or thoughts when somebody is telling a story like the one that you did, that some people are going to view one way or another as political, how do you get them to still pay attention.

Keep it row if it's coming from a place where you're not virtue signaling, You're just like, this is how it is.

It's from an emotional place.

It is from the deepest places in my heart.

Looked at this film from a pure, innocent child's perspective.

Don't add anything.

There's no need to send signals that occupation is bad, or that Israel is mean, or that Palestinians have the right to resist or whatever.

This is simply a story of humans living in a human created problem and they're dealing with it, and the world needs to see it for what it is.

Let the audience decide what their politics are.

If they see your film and become more extremist, then it's probably a problem with them, and no matter what messaging you put into your film, that's not going to change their thoughts.

I think the most powerful thing we have as humans is our ability to share our emotions with each other, and that's what makes us social animals, and so it makes us who we are.

So ironic about that is that when you do let people decide, the effect is often more emotionally strong, like you're able to reach more people if you don't try to make up their minds for them.

Exactly.

It's a truly beautiful film.

I hope you are so proud about it, and you said thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you, Matt, I really appreciate it.

Three Promises is now available to stream in North America.

You can find out on Apple TV in Prime Video by searching three Promises.

Origin Stories is a production of Campside Media, hosted by me Matthew Cher and produced by abacar Adn.

This episode was sound designed by Garrett Tiedeman, theme music by Doug Slawan.

Our studio engineer is Jimmy Guthrie at Arcade one sixty Studios.

Special thanks to Michael Kenyon Mayer at Campside and Chris McLeod at Blue Elevator Productions