Ottawa filmmaker Ed Kucerak recently premiered a documentary that followed Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jody Williams and Mairead Maguire as they led a delegation of North American women to the Middle East in search of ways to end conflict in the region.
The documentary, Partners for Peace, was scheduled to premiere on Thursday as the opening film for the 24th annual One World Film Festival,held Sept. 26-28 at the Library and Archives Canada.
Pixie Cram, the festival’s programming director, says she chose the film to open festival because of the powerful message it sends to those who may not know much about the conflict.
“The women who participate in the delegations are very honest about their own reactions, and their biases. You see them breaking down, and coming up against their own limitations, and acknowledging that.”
Palestinians and Israelis have been in a constant state of war since the mid-20th century. Currently, Israel has a much larger army, and controls the population with massive walls and checkpoints around their settlements. Palestinians live under very strict conditions and Israeli’s live in fear of terrorist attacks.
Kucerak says he was approached by members of the Ottawa-based Nobel Women’s Initiative, after the women returned from Israel and Palestine in 2010. The NWI funded the trip, and shot all of the footage, then came back and asked Kucerak to make a film from it.
The documentary focuses on three of the delegates: Williams, 62, an American who worked to successfully ban the use of anti-personnel land mines; Maguire, 69, a peace activist from Northern Ireland; and Jaclyn Friedman, 42, a writer and activist from Boston.
The film is also narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Marisa Tomei, who did the work free of charge from Los Angeles as a favour to Williams.
Friedman, who’s Jewish, had never actually gone to Israel before, and was a bit taken aback by the offer. Most of her work focuses on fighting for gender equality in the media, she says.
But according to Kucerak, an inexperienced “every woman” was exactly what the documentary needed. One of the film’s main goals is to introduce the issues in the region, to people who have little knowledge of what’s going on there, he says.
Friedman, self-described as the “designated crier,” says the experience was incredibly moving. “I’m pretty sure I was in tears half the time I was there.”
The most touching part for her was when the delegation paired Israeli and Palestinian women, and gave them a translator, so they could form relationships with each other.
“I just felt like, if these women can make peace with each other, then what is our excuse?”
While Friedman never feared for her life, there were times when she felt the weight of the conflict.
“We were not made to feel welcome in Hebron. When we went through the checkpoint into the settlement the guard made a point to aim his machine gun at each of our foreheads.”
While Kucerak says it was hard to form a narrative from the footage, the movie is essentially about women going to meetings, Cram says he’s done a wonderful job of humanizing the conflict.
“What you see is people doing work through their hearts. And it actually changes things. It’s not about who has the best rhetoric, it’s about understanding and completely having compassion for who you perceive as your enemy, because you share a common tragedy.”