BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Director's Statement

The inspiration for BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH started in a falafel shop in Haifa, when the Palestinian owner told me about his son refusing a film scholarship in London because "he’s one of the “guardians” of the now destroyed village of Iqrit. I was ashamed to admit I had not heard of Iqrit, and arranged to find this village the following weekend.The trip to Iqrit, three kilometers away from the Lebanese border, and non-existent on Google maps, took us ten hours to reach — and only when my partner finally saw a church steeple in the distance. A heavily treed, winding unpaved hidden road lead us to a partly destroyed church. Two young men and a woman, the grandchildren or perhaps the great-grandchildren of those forced out of Iqrit, greeted us warily. They warmed up when we told them who sent us. Sipping tea, overlooking the gravesite in the distance, they told us the story of Iqrit, how their grandparents watched the destruction of their village, and how they then raised their case to the Israeli High Court in 1952 and won the right of return. However not allowed to implement the court decision, they have to remain physically on the land so it would not be confiscated. They showed us the shack they built for shelter, and told us more stories before their parents came up the pathway, bringing dinner for their children.For the five hour trip back home, I couldn’t stop thinking about these “guardians” and their stories. Their resilience was uplifting, creating hope. The dark times we were living in the Palestinian Territory was suffocating, with hope drifting further and further away with each passing day and each political decision. But somehow in Iqrit I saw light and happiness ... and, in many ways, love. As someone who loves love stories ... perhaps a way to escape and dream - I started to conjure up a story of a couple getting a divorce. How do you love under occupation or when everything has been taken from you? How do you not allow the heartbreak of your everyday life in seeing injustice, not affect your own personal relationships? And what if your partner passed through an unthinkable experience ... can you ever truly divorce what is happening around you from yourself? A love story about divorce in a divided country with a young Palestinian couple forced to stay together for a road trip, took them and myself into many overlooked stories from the forgotten Palestinians inside the state of Israel, to the Syrians and Druze in the Golan Heights, and to the Arab Jews who were brought in from the Arab World.As I was researching, I found one story in particular that grabbed my attention. It was a story which only recently began to make headlines. Reports between 1949-52 indicated that close to 8, 000 Arab Jewish babies were kidnapped from their families when they arrived to the new State, and given to Ashkenazi Jews (European Jews) to be raised as non-Arab Jews. The parents were told that their babies had died, and 18 years later the army draft letters to the same parents began arriving, raising many questions which demanded the truth. This story shook me to the core. I saw very different Palestinian and Israeli dreams awakened by a nightmare. For decades, the discourse on Palestinians and Arab Jews has been misrepresented and oversimplified, creating an askew discussion. For far too long, this side of the story has been told by many others overlooking the Arab (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) perspective, the place and the people involved. This journey that started as one filled with questions, became a journey that needs both the Palestinian and Israeli communities to come together to find answers.Only by hearing stories, seeing different pictures and realities of this conflicted land ... can there truly be an understanding of the place, its people, their dreams, aspirations of dignity and justice.