David Koff's documentary Occupied Palestine caused a storm in the 1980s. What will today's audiences make of it? The film-maker relives a life of controversy
David Koff is remembering what happened at the premiere of his film Occupied Palestine in San Francisco in 1981. "There were probably 1,000 people in the audience," he recalls. "Ten minutes after the film started, there was an announcement: 'There's been a bomb threat – please evacuate the building.' The police and fire department were called. There was a remarkable atmosphere in the cinema when the film finally went ahead."
Koff, now 73, is an American documentary film-maker, writer, union organiser and activist. He grew up in California, graduated in political science from Stanford University, then worked in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and London before returning to the US. His documentary-making career has never lacked controversy. In the early 1970s, with the assistance of colleague Anthony Howarth and music from a young Peter Frampton, his trilogy of films about East Africa made waves. Called The Black Man's Land, this was an uncompromising examination of British colonialism, the Mau Mau and the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.
Koff then moved to London. "At that time, Britain was a very good place to make documentaries," he says. He is best known in the UK for his 1978 film Blacks Britannica, which was commissioned by the Boston TV station WGBH. Using archive footage, interviews with Trinidad-born sociologist Colin Prescod (among others), and music from Steel Pulse, it portrayed Britain as profoundly racist – and caused a storm in both Britain and the US, where it was attacked for having a "Marxist agenda".
Occupied Palestine, which will open the Palestine Film festival in London this week, followed shortly after. "Like the films in Africa, it was an effort to give a voice to those people who rarely, if ever, are presented on film," says Koff. The film catalogued the effect of Israeli settlements on Palestinian villages. "It seemed this was a story that hadn't been told, and needed to be. I remember showing it to Edward Said [the late Palestinian historian]. He was shocked at the degree of resistance reflected in the film."
The interviewees, from both sides of the conflict, show how entrenched the two sides were, even then. One American Jewish settler refers to the "so-called Palestinians". Another explains that "when Abraham came here and got the promise from God, it was right here in Shechem [Nablus] … the Arabs must accept that." A Palestinian student says: "Zionism appeared at the end of the 19th century as a political movement representing Jewish capital, allied with international capital." Koff remembers: "We weren't endorsing what anyone said, but that line was used as a stick to beat the film."
Koff says the 1981 bomb threat had a huge knock-on effect: cinemas were reluctant to screen the film and its subsequent life has been mainly on university campuses. "Things have changed since then – there is much more understanding now." He says the fact that a film such as 2011's 5 Broken Cameras, made by the Palestinian Emad Burnat and the Israeli Guy Davidi and covering the same conflict, "can be nominated for an Oscar is fantastic. And there are Palestinian film festivals all over the place."
It came as a "huge surprise" to Koff when Occupied Palestine was chosen to open the London event. But, as festival director Nick Denes explains, it was "radically new in its day": at the time, most films about Palestine focused on militants, refugees and leaders from outside rather than inside the country.
Koff eventually left London and moved back to California to work for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, which campaigns on behalf of a mainly Latino workforce. His 2002 film, Windows, told the stories of the chiefly immigrant restaurant workers who died in the 9/11 attacks. His most recent documentary, The New Haven Raids, is about US immigration department arrests of Latinos suspected of being illegal. Ry Cooder wrote its score.
Activism runs in Koff's family. Clea, his London-born daughter, is a forensic anthropologist who worked for the UN's international criminal tribunal in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; she wrote about the horrors she uncovered in 2004's The Bone Woman. Koff himself is now writing a science-fiction environmental thriller. He says he is looking forward to seeing Occupied Palestine again. "I haven't seen it in the company of a large audience since that time in San Francisco," he says. "So I'm very interested in how people will react now."
The London Palestine Film festival runs from 3-15 May. Details: palestinefilm.org
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/01/david-koff-documentary-occupied-palestine
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