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Sept. 27, 2013
Politics and art collide
Connie Field’s Al Helm is unexpectedly tense.
MICHAEL FOX
For a documentary that embraces the pursuit of equal rights through nonviolence as one of its key themes, Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine is an unexpectedly tense and uncomfortable experience – regardless of one’s political leanings.
Al Helm follows an African American playwright and gospel choir to the West Bank, and documents their fraught collaboration with a Palestinian theatre troupe on a play about the late civil-rights leader.
“What was so fascinating about following this story was that you had a group of Americans who were quite new to this situation and this reality,” said San Francisco Bay-area filmmaker Connie Field. “They really knew very little about it.”
The film, which receives its North American première Sept. 29 at the Vancouver International Film Festival, invites viewers to see the Palestinians through the eyes of Christians, whose only knowledge of the Holy Land came from their ministers and the Bible. Their emotional trip encompasses culture clash, culture shock and political awakening, capped by their surprise and gratification at the relevance of Dr. King’s teachings in the context of the Palestinian struggle.
Be advised that Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine is not a feel-good film, despite the high-minded ideals of its protagonists. The prickly nature of artistic collaboration works as a metaphor for the contested and often painful nature of progress in other arenas.
Al Helm marks the Jewish filmmaker’s first verité documentary in a career of important historical docs. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) revived the forgotten contributions of women in the workforce during the Second World War, and Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1990, co-directed with Judith Montell) did the same for the brave, committed Americans (many of them Jews) who went to Spain in the 1930s to fight fascism. Her Academy Award-nominated Freedom on My Mind (1994, co-directed with Marilyn Mulford) revisited the interracial voter registration campaigns in Mississippi in the early 1960s that were an important part of the civil-rights movement. Field’s ambitious and definitive seven-chapter history of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, Have You Heard from Johannesburg (2010), won an Emmy and a VIFF prize, among other accolades.
“I didn’t have an agenda with Al Helm,” Field told the Jewish Independent. “Normally, I do have more agendas, or ways I see things. I come up with an idea for a film because it’s something I understand the meaning of, and consider important, such as the exploration of a global movement, like the story of the anti-apartheid movement. I know why I feel it’s important. [In this case,] I was brought to a play and I just kept following these people.”
The play was Passages of Martin Luther King by Prof. Clayborne Carson, the founder and head of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Chosen many years ago by Coretta Scott King to edit and publish Dr. King’s papers, Carson had been Field’s historical consultant on Freedom on My Mind and Have You Heard from Johannesburg.
In 2007, a group of African American gospel singers performed Passages of Martin Luther King in Beijing with the National Theatre of China. When Carson received a grant in the spring of 2011 to stage his play in the West Bank with a gospel choir and the Palestinian national theatre, Al Hakawati, he invited Field on short notice. She’d never made a film this way, but she dropped what she was doing and joined the caravan.
Al Helm doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable moments, whether it’s Carson’s enormous (though carefully modulated) displeasure that director Kamel el-Basha moved the ending of the play to the beginning without telling him, or the proximity of the separation wall to a Palestinian home, or the netting over walkways in some areas of Hebron to catch garbage and debris thrown by Israeli settlers.
“I didn’t make this for a Jewish audience, that’s for sure,” Field said. “I went, and I followed. And I came back and said, ‘What story did I just follow? What did I see?’ I didn’t go with [the attitude that] I’m going to tackle this subject.”
However, Field said that during the editing process she intentionally included a brief shot to convey that some Israelis disagree with the government’s policies.
“The only thing I did to speak to Jewish audiences, or to progressive Jewish audiences, is to make sure that I showed Israelis demonstrating with Palestinians,” she explained. “That was the only thing I was deliberate about.”
While there are moments that will be difficult for Israel supporters to watch – in particular, an Israeli soldier hitting and tackling an unarmed demonstrator, an event that is presented without context – Field said that she limited the film’s focus to what the black American singers witnessed touring the play to east Jerusalem, Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, Ramallah and Hebron.
“I don’t [include] a million stories about people getting beat up – which they do – because that was not something that the choir personally saw,” Field said. “They did see the settlements. They did see the disparity. It’s extraordinary; the settlements look like little oases while the Palestinians don’t get enough water. The Israelis control and ration the water.”
With one exception, the Palestinians in Al Helm are artists, not political activists. The actor who plays Dr. King had been arrested and imprisoned in his teens for owning a low-wattage radio and making (innocent, he says) broadcasts. However, the lone outright activist is a shy, Stanford-educated physicist who’d taken a class with Carson and now, inspired by King, boards and “integrates” an Egged bus (and is arrested).
“I kept what the Palestinians said to things that I felt were clear issues,” Field asserted. “A clear issue for me is the settlements. It’s a huge problem. They shouldn’t be there. And no one can convince me it’s a good thing, for the Israelis or the Palestinians.”
Both the tour and Al Helm reach their emotional climax with the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a groundbreaking (and part-Jewish) Palestinian theatre owner and peace proponent by another Palestinian that happens on the anniversary of King’s death, followed closely by the final performance of Passages of Martin Luther King.
Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine screens Sept. 29, Oct. 1 and 3 at VIFF. For tickets and screening information, visit viff.org.
Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
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