Palestinian Filmmaker Rashid Masharawi Talks About Opening Cairo Film Festival With ‘Passing Dreams’: ‘Hope Is Part of the Resistance’

variety.com:

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi opens the Cairo Film Festival with the world premiere of his new film “Passing Dreams” — that most unlikely of genres: the Palestinian road movie.

The film tells the story of Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash), a 12-year-old living in a refugee camp in the West Bank. His father is in jail and his carrier pigeon has flown away so he heads off to Bethlehem to ask his uncle (Ashraf Barhom) to help him find the lost bird.

While not shying away from the realities of life in the Occupied Territories, the film remains optimistic. Masharawi agrees, talking with Variety on the eve of the festival: “Where there is no hope, cinema should invent it just to show it to the people and make them touch it and believe in it because this also is part of our resistance.

After all the years of occupation, still now we have hope, because we like tomorrow.” Filming in the real locations in the West Bank, Bethlehem, old city of Jerusalem and Haifa was unsurprisingly a challenge: “For Palestinian filmmakers to make a fiction [film] is very difficult.