Deadline’s Doc Talk Podcast Puts Pedal To The Metal With ‘Speed Sisters’ Director Amber Fares, Filmmaker Telling Unexpected Stories From Palestine & Israel
deadline.comWhen director Amber Fares came out with her documentary Speed Sisters, about the Middle East’s first all-women race car driving team, the New York Times praised it as “unconventional in form as well as content.” Many films about that part of the world have depicted Arab women cloaked in niqabs, obscuring their uniqueness as individuals.
But here, Marah, Mona, Noor and Betty sport logo-covered racing jumpsuits as they tear around streets of the West Bank. “I do it for the release,” says Mona of the adrenaline rush that comes from burning rubber on hot pavement.
Doc Talk podcast co-host John Ridley revisits the film with Fares several years after its initial release, a documentary that takes on new significance with the ongoing conflagration in Gaza, only a few miles distant from the West Bank.
Ridley also reckons with the director’s short film Reckoning with Laughter, about the daring Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster, who spent her formative years in Neve Shalom/Wāħat as-Salām (“Oasis of Peace”), an unusual community outside of Jerusalem where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side – by choice.
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