Introduction

1The research results, which mostly in the form of academic writing, are usually signed only by the lead researchers, thus hiding the work of multiple other individuals and interlocutors integral to the knowledge production and reflection process. Being the author of an academic production implicitly implies a form of authority and a certain power over the knowledge produced. In this sense, one may claim that not sharing authorship with the people involved in the research process strips the interlocutors of their power over the knowledge produced. Also, it may lead, to put it in geographical terms, to a socio-spatial divide between the two groups—the researchers on the one hand, and interlocutors on the other. While researchers have the possibility of circulating between several spheres, the field and the academic world, the unknown informant remains confined to the local sphere.

2These imbalances in power over knowledge production between the researchers and their interlocutors, it is important to note, are not unique to conventional research projects, but also characterises those that combine visual approaches as methodological tools to document and analyse the lives of people. On many occasions, visual productions carried out as part of doctoral research projects occupy a marginal position in the final output. Too often the visual outputs are considered as an appendix, rather than an integral part of the doctoral process. Occasionally, the researchers are also the sole producer—director of the visual output, thus imperatively relegating the interlocutors to the position of an object (of study) rather than an agent who holds power over the knowledge production process. While often genuine intentions for collaboration do exist, the process is marked with condescension on behalf of the researcher towards the population “studied,” which in turn risk crippling the process of collaboration (Parr 2007).

3This chapter aims to demonstrate how documentary production in a research project can be a tool to build a collaborative research design. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate the importance of documentary co-production within a research project in reinstating the interlocutors’ power over knowledge production and allowing them to assume co-ownership of the research process and its results. The chapter is based on the experience of co-directing the film The Walls of Dheisheh, involving French doctoral student Clémence Lehec and Palestinian filmmaker Tamara Abu Laban. Empirically, the chapter aims to engage with and describe the negotiation process involved in the co-construction of knowledge for this documentary production.

4The Walls of Dheisheh is an interview-based documentary that simultaneously served as a data collection methodology to examine Palestinian graffiti and artists within the framework of a doctoral research project and a research result, constituting a visual output to fulfil the requirement for obtaining a PhD. Produced by Clémence Lehec and co-directed with Tamara Abu Laban, this 36-minute-long documentary1 aims to retrace and understand the history of Palestinian graffiti movement in the Dheisheh Camp,2 located in the West Bank3. The camp walls are a canvas for graffiti artwork that formed an integral part of the Palestinian struggle against occupation and colonisation; therefore, it is an imperative site to understand the relationship between art and politics in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

5The documentary production team were composed, in the main, of a Dheisheh Camp inhabitant with work experience in cinema production. The people interviewed in the documentary are successive generations of graffiti painters, who narrated the evolution of the graffiti movement over time, tracing the genealogy of their motivations and explaining the conceptual framing of the walls’ artwork. The nature of the project as a doctoral research project and the collaborative model adopted in the documentary production process created a space of negotiation and contestation over the production of knowledge, which allowed for the realisation of a knowledge production model that is fully collaborative. The co-production of a documentary within a research project, we argue, reinstates power to the people by allowing them to assume co-ownership right down to the research results

6Geography constitutes the framework in which the doctoral research has been done, and the documentary produced. This discipline is in touch with the visual in an ontological and methodological way. Gillian Rose, for instance, has documented and problematised the relationship of the discipline with the visual dimension (Rose 2003). Sara Kindon, who in 2002 deplored the fact that few geographers have moved beyond the dominant, masculinist, and colonial model of knowledge production (Kindon 2003), has also contributed to this problematisation. By advancing the possibility of using participatory video to practice feminist geography that moves away from the dominant observational model, she calls for a shift in geography’s scientific paradigm. Indeed, Kindon, quoting Ekinsmyth, sees feminist geography as representing: “an acknowledgement of the partiality of all knowledge; a sensitivity to power relations; a faith in ‘everyday knowledges’; an openness to a diversity of approaches; and the importance of emancipatory goals for research outcomes (Ekinsmyth 2002, 177)” (Kindon 2003, 150). Kindon argues that using participatory video as a feminist geography practice allows for “exploring the production of a ‘new politics of knowledge’ together (i.e. researchers and researched)” (Kindon 2003, 148), and thus strengthening the prospect for political change.

7Despite these promising analyses, it is still difficult, however, to give a precise definition of what a participatory video actually is, and what constitutes its participatory dimension. In general, “participatory videos” are often referred to in several ways. Some call this type of method “participatory” (video), others “community” or “collaborative” videos. These designations correspond to audiovisual production projects that involve the “object” of the study—the people—as central actors in the production process at multiple levels. This chapter adopts the term “collaborative” video to better describe the production process adopted in our project. The use of this notion is based on a conscious decision, and suggests a critical appraisal of the alternative concepts. The idea of “participation” implied in “participatory video,” does not seem strong enough in our views since it etymologically corresponds to saying “taking part in.” In a way, the term “participatory” means that something pre-existed the fact that individuals take part in a project. The term “community” in “community video” also implies certain prior homogeneity of the group with which one is going to work. Collaborating then seems closer to the method that has been experimented with, in that it is simply a matter of “working together.” This is the most neutral term to describe a practice that has been recognised a posteriori, as carrying some of the same objectives as feminist and decolonial approaches.

8This chapter offers an opportunity for a reflexive analysis on the way the collaborative process was constructed, and the documentary produced. This chapter goes out of the usual canons of scientific papers. Tamara Abu Laban and Clémence Lehec will both take turns speaking during the course of this reflection process so that each of our positions can be made explicit in its particularities, thus highlighting the path that has been travelled to build a common voice exemplified in our documentary, The Walls of Dheisheh. In the following sections, the parts in italic were written by Abu Laban, while Lehec wrote the others. By looking back at our documentary choices, we will first reveal behind the scenes of a collaborative research project. Starting with our notes of intention, we will explain how the construction of the documentary was a constant negotiation between our two perspectives. To gradually move towards the most complex elements, in the second part we propose a journey that will shed light on the choices we made concerning the style of the documentary as an interview-based one, and the selection of the interviewees. Third, we will discuss two editing techniques that we used, which consisted of contradictory cinematographic temporalities, traveling shots,4 and jump cuts,5 to account for the space of the camp. We will use these examples of contradictory cinematographic temporalities to reflect our different positions towards the camp as a space to depict. Fourth, we will return to an emblematic moment of negotiation around the shuhada6 issue to show how our two perspectives were able to find visual compromises, before we conclude.

A brief introduction to The Walls of Dheisheh documentary project: Our two perspectives

9We worked for months on our documentary, The Walls of Dheisheh; we watched it in parts and its entirety thousands of times, and after all of that, it is strange how I still enjoyed it just like any audience when I watched it with people in the cinema. For almost one year I did not see the film at all, and recently I have experienced seeing it again with fresh eyes. I watched the film at the Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival alone, and at the Cinema Med (Mediterranean Cinema Film Festival) in Brussels with my co-director. I remembered a line I read once: “Your reward is to move hearts and minds and maybe change the world a little.” This is what I felt when our film was screened in festivals; that we are trying to change the world, a little.

10If I go back to the time Clémence and I were discussing the ideas in the pre-production phase, that was when I asked myself for the first time: what do I see on the walls of the camp? I needed to look with a fresh eye; for my whole life, I was used to walking beside the walls in the narrow streets, I never observed, and for many years I stopped seeing what was written on the walls. Then, before the film production, I wrote an article (Abu Laban 2013), and for the first time, I tried to see familiar things as if I had never seen them before.

11It is not easy to be objective, that is why having two directors, one from Dheisheh camp and one from Europe makes sense. I know the places, cultures, politics, and complications while Clémence has a fresh look, and she can see things from a long distance as a foreigner and a researcher. It is another perspective.

12Every film you produce is an experience, what happened with me in this film was to experience what I already experienced in my life, so it was not about acquiring new knowledge this time; rather, the idea of having a different perspective was the adventure. Clémence asked me once: “Why didn’t you make any film about the camp before, since you were born here?” I really do not know why. Maybe I did not want to dig deeper in my history related to this place, because it is full of tragedy, believe me, it is not easy—but on the other hand, to not focus on the things you care about is to deny the loyalty to your story.

13Tamara Abu Laban and I have a very different relationship to the camp; whereas it is a familiar place to her—in that it is the place of her childhood, and she works there today—it is a space that is foreign to me. Our perspectives are also contrasted in terms of the motivations for making this documentary. For me it was to produce a scientific document, while for Tamara it was to make, for the first time in her career as a filmmaker, a documentary about this place that is dear to her.

14Through the study of graffiti on the Dheisheh refugee camp walls, I have been working on the concept of borders. This approach is in line with the geography of art, which aims to study spatial elements from the perspective study of a practice or an aesthetic object. Some researchers have noted the emergence of a new art form, called border art, which corresponds to works at stake with the border (Amilhat Szary 2012; Giudice et Giubilaro 2015; Guilló 2016; Schimanski 2015). The artworks can then either take the border itself as object support, or deal with the thematic aspect of it. Given this observation of the use of the border element by artists, some geographers have reversed the proposal by analysing the border fact through art (Iglesias Prieto 2007; Amilhat Szary and Fourny 2010). Within the framework of this research, graffiti—an art on the margins of the artistic field that is in touch with the “limits” (of legality; (bodily) ability of graffiti artist’s body, etc.)—has made it possible to reflect on borders, understood in a plural sense. Following the new development of border studies, we do not define the border in the strict sense of a line separating two states, nor are we interested in the purely material dimension of the border. The border is to be understood in all the complexity of the system that surrounds it—which has been called, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, the “closure pattern”7 (Salenson 2009) or the “matrix of control” (Halper et Younan 2009) in its diffuse nature and at all scales, even down to the bodies that are controlled.

15This approach to the border follows the new definition of it as a mobile border (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015; Gilbert et al. 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Nail 2016; Steinberg 2009), which I have defined as one of its occurrences through the concept of a Damocles border. Given that Israeli soldiers regularly make military incursions into the Dheisheh camp to arrest certain people, it appears that the border is actualised and moved in these moments of military raids. The fact that the graffiti artists paint at night, thus exposing themselves to an increased risk of being in the camps’ streets at the same time the Israeli army invades it, has made it necessary to form this notion of the Damocles border. Thus, according to a nocturnal appearance regime, the border weighs on the bodies of Palestinian refugees and appears as something that always has the potential to lead to confinement (if there is arrest and imprisonment) or death. The Damocles border is an element that can be actualised in extremely different temporal and spatial modalities, making it always a potential. It is a mobile and embedded boundary that glides as close to the bodies as possible, that is why it is defined with the Damocles image; that is to say, from the perspective of the bodies it constrains. Being ephemeral, it is also potentially always there. It is a declination of the frontier that signifies confinement or danger, the limit from life to death being at stake in its always potential actualisation. The actualisation of the frontier corresponds to a crossing or displacement of the latter, in a context where its emergence is not fixed but always possible, according to the Israeli military invasion.

16It is in the frame of this research that I had the chance to meet Tamara Abu Laban and to work on the production and realisation of the documentary film, The Walls of Dheisheh, that was codirected with her and that formed part of the results of my doctoral thesis. Our contrasting perspectives are perceptible in the artistic choices we have made along the way, which we will detail in the following sections.

Interviews to chronicle the history of Palestinian graffiti

17The movie The Walls of Dheisheh relies on eight interviews. The persons interviewed in the documentary were selected from a poll of 30 people in an interview panel, which I (Clémence Lehec) led during the fieldwork. The interviewees were selected because they were representative of a specific period in the Dheisheh graffiti movement. By order of their appearance in the documentary, Saleh Abu Laban and Mohammad Manasra were the first interviewed. They both represent the very first generation of graffiti painters in Palestinian refugee camps in the late 1960s. Mohammad Allaham was the second to be interviewed, since he represents the generation of the First Intifada. Finally, Mohammad Al Saifi, Aysar Al Saifi, Ali Obeid, Kareema Obeid, and Ahmed Saleh were interviewed. They all belong to the new generation of graffiti painters who were until recently or are still active today, except for Kareema Obeid, who is the mother of one of the artists. She was interviewed to shed light on how relatives of the graffiti painters perceive their activity.

18Clémence took the decision about what interviews to conduct, and whether it should be one person alone interview or two people together. The two people interview was thought of as a means to break out of the formal interview format to provoke a discussion between two interviewees. I liked the common interview of Saleh Abu Laban and Mohammad Manasra. In a documentary production, we can learn about people’s interaction on screen, their chemistry, and trigger debate. I could feel the great chemistry between Saleh and Mohammad. It is like a colour mix—sometimes when we mix two colours, we end up with a better colour.

19Our idea was to shoot this movie in Arabic, even though Clémence does not speak it. It was clear to us that we would have better interviews with people speaking with their own words using their mother tongue. But since there are some ideas that you cannot translate, people who do not speak Arabic might miss some elements, like the words written on the walls or the names of the destroyed villages from where Dheisheh inhabitants’ descent from that are listed on one mural at the entrance of the camp. Maybe next time we should take this into consideration in the editing process, to dedicate some time to translating the murals themselves.

20The film shows three generations of Palestinian graffiti artists: the older are proud of the time they were active in wall painting, and of what they did as first painters on the camp’s walls. Mohammad Manasra, from the first generation, is proud of what he has accomplished in the period before the First Intifada and during its early years. At that time, graffiti artists were not organised at all. Their activities were very spontaneous. The practice of graffiti was carried out by individuals based on their own decisions. These individuals were not organised, nor were they members of any political faction or a graffiti movement. The very first graffiti painters started to spray slogans on the camp walls already in the late ‘60s, inspired by the Algerian struggle.

21The second generation is represented by Mohammad Allaham, a political activist, especially active during the First Intifada. Allaham describes how, during his active period, everything was organised and planned to the fine details: what to write, who should write it, and how they should write it.

22He remembered how they used to go out at night with a group of young men mandated by political factions to write slogans. The one who supposedly had the most beautiful handwriting was the one entrusted to write the slogans, whereas the others were watching the surroundings or holding a light. Julie Peteet describes this act of spraying political slogans as a rite of passage in the young men’s political socialisation (Peteet 1996). Indeed, this change to a more organised Palestinian graffiti scene in the First Intifada has contributed to its formation as a movement with particularly distinguished signs and codes. For example, at that time, political parties used particular colours to distinguish themselves from each other. The rise of graffiti as a movement is also linked to the lack of alternative means of communication to organise civil resistance during the First Intifada. Graffiti served as a medium and means to communicate and mobilise the resistance.

23I (Tamara Abu Laban) remember in the First Intifada when I was very little (around 1992). I could read some words, I tried to read the logo of one of the political factions but I could not. So, I asked my mother about it and what it meant, it was the logo of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), in Arabic it is comprised of the two letters (Jim-Shin/ Jish) (جش) (Jabha Shabiya) and for a child, it does not make sense. In addition to the political slogans, Saddam Hussein was a prominent figure graffitied on the walls during the First Intifada. Indeed, the co-presence of the popular struggle in Palestine and the president of Iraq on the walls may appear strange for some. When I was small, I heard a lot about Saddam Hussein and his support to the Palestinian cause and Palestinians. His representation on the camp’s walls is not unique, since acts of solidarity with the oppressed of those who supported Palestinians have always featured on the walls. When you are a victim living under occupation, experiencing injustice and everyday oppression, you feel pain, and you need to express it. People wanted to speak up about their situation and to thank those who supported them. This was their way to communicate, mobilise, express their opinions, and show gratitude.

24Using the walls of the camp as a medium of communication was an important means for the Palestinians, who found themselves alone in the battle against the occupation forces. During the First Intifada in the late 1980s there was no social media, and the Israelis imposed censorship on Palestinian media. The walls of the camp are common property that served as a platform allowing people to connect and mobilise despite the curfew. But as Kareema Obeid mentioned in the documentary, in the ‘80s there were no paintings like today. During the First Intifada, people did not have the chance to express themselves easily since Israeli soldiers were everywhere—so the slogans and artwork has to be short and concise, and obviously completed very quickly.

25The third-generation graffiti painters, active in the camp today, are (re)claiming the legacy of the First Intifada while freeing themselves from political factions. In a way, they are increasingly dissenting because they refuse to participate in political struggles, i.e., party-related struggles, favouring instead more comprehensive demands for liberation and justice. Nowadays, one can see bigger paintings than ever before on the camp’s walls but the restrictions remain, although different in nature, since means of communication have changed with the rise of social media. Whereby in the recent past the walls of the camp were closely monitored for what they represent, today the walls of the social media hold similar representations. Today, for instance, any Palestinian—from a camp or even a citizen of Israel—that writes a post on Facebook that does not fit with Israeli policy may be jailed, or in less serious repercussions, Facebook will shut down their account. Thus, even if the graffiti looks larger than before, the restrictions on voice are still the same. In other words, even if the act of painting on walls is less dangerous than it used to be during the First Intifada—soldiers were often in and around the camp, which in turn was surrounded by a fence with only one access (check)point—one can still today be arrested for spreading slogans on the physical or virtual walls.

26Ahmed Saleh is a part of this new generation; he also was the camera assistant on the set. He said that the paintings on the walls are a way to remember the ones who lost their lives for the sake of their people. It is a way of documentation. I (Tamara Abu Laban) lived in the camp, and I never thought about graffiti this way, as a way to document the history of the camp. When we say this, “the history of the camp,” it sounds inappropriate because the camp was built to be temporary and now it persists, and we can see that from the layers on the wall, which Clemence would call palimpsests (Lehec 2017). Having a lot of graffiti on the walls is particular to the camps. This kind of street art is very much connected with oppression, it is a medium for voices of political change, or expressions of community desire, and considered a form of collective expression that does not exist in settler societies. As I wrote before, “wherever there is a revolutionary spirit, there is graffiti” (Abu Laban 2013).

27Making an interview documentary in Arabic was the first major choice we made in the process of making the film. Through the presentation of the interviews of one or several emblematic people of a particular moment in the Palestinian graffiti movement, we were able to give a global idea of its history. Now we would like to return to the use of two particular cinematographic techniques, which allowed us to coincide our perceptions of the camp within the visual restitution of its landscapes.

Depicting the camp with contradictory cinematographic temporalities: Traveling shots and jump cuts

28After a week’s filming in the Dheisheh camp, the footage was translated and a first cut was made from selected pieces of interviews. Two months later, Tamara came to Geneva to work on the editing of the film for two weeks. At this point in the film’s conception, we had to make editing choices that were in line with our two points of view. Our two perspectives on the space of the camp are visible on the screen through the use of cinematographic techniques involving contradictory temporalities.

29Tamara Abu Laban very quickly suggested, during the editing process, to use the jump cut technique. This technique involves editing several shots of the same sequence end to end, without transition, which creates temporal ellipses. The introductory sequence of the documentary, which shows graffiti artists painting, was edited this way. This technique can be found several times in the documentary, such as at the end of the first third of the documentary, when we see the sun setting over the Dheisheh camp. We particularly liked this technique because it brings dynamism to the editing by the temporal jumps it induces, which would not have appeared in the same way with a time-lapse, for example.

30Right from the start, when we discussed our artistic intentions for the documentary, I told Tamara that I wanted to insert several traveling shots that would allow the audience to walk through the winding streets of the camp. So, we shot this kind of scene, using a steady-cam, while walking around the camp or filming the camp from Tamara’s car. These shots were important to me in order to allow the audience to immerse themselves in the camp, as I had immersed myself in it by walking through its alleys. The camp is not a place where one walks easily, it is not a place one can visit on his/her own. Indeed, one will feel a stranger walking through the camp and moreover, it is not an easy place to discover because of its labyrinthine streets. So, it was a question of allowing the spectator of the film to benefit from this inside view.

31Tamara and I made a choice to insert the first traveling shot in a short way from the eleventh minute. This traveling scene allowed us to make the transition between two generations of graffiti artists. It also served to build a new dynamic within the documentary, by integrating a new cinematographic language element, which was not present in the first third of the film. A second-long traveling shot was inserted at the twenty-sixth minute. This scene was thought of as a breathing space within the film. There is no dialogue throughout this sequence (made up of several traveling shots) and it is possible to hear footsteps. These were my (Clémence Lehec) footsteps, which indicated to Husam Al Khateeb (the sound engineer and the only one member of the crew who was not familiar with the camp), who at the time had taken the camera to shoot with me in pairs the alleyways, that I wanted us to stride along. This long sequence allowed us to make the transition between the shuhada theme and the border theme, which is addressed at the end of the documentary.

32From a cinematographic writing point of view, this second traveling scene was conceived as a moment of transition towards a moment of reflection on the shuhada and death, before it proceeds with a reflection on the limits and boundaries of the camp. Juxtaposing these two themes result in creating a bond between the two. The link constructed within the documentary between the question of the potential death of graffiti artists and the question of borders corresponds to a rise in abstraction. It is then a question of staging the border of Damocles, even though its meaning is not made explicit or explained in the documentary, which was deliberately left free from a voice-over. The last traveling scene, which closes the film, meant to give the audience a moment of breathing.

33These two contrasting temporalities, which are present in the editing through the techniques of jumpcuts and traveling shots, are emblematic of the differentiated relationship we have with the camp. Significantly, while Tamara has a broad knowledge of it, she proposed the technique of jumpcuts that creates ellipses and a certain dynamism on the screen. As for me, the traveling shots became necessary to be able to show a slower time, which is the time of discovery.

34The co-presence of these two cinematographic temporalities to restitute the space of the camp took place spontaneously during the editing work. Some other themes, however, gave rise to long discussions, such as the way to portray the shuhada, for example. This question is emblematic of the negotiation that took place between the two of us, in order to co-produce knowledge through this documentary.

Emblematic moment of negotiation: The shuhada question

35Aysar Al Saifi and Mohamad Allaham (they are from two different genera­tions) first engaged in graffiti after someone was killed in the camp by Israeli soldiers, as an act of expressing their anger and commemorating those who lost their lives for Palestine. The shuhada portraits, one of the most prominent themes on the camp walls, represents the idea that we will never forget those who lost their lives for Palestine. The Israeli occupation forces frequently invade Dheisheh camp. They kill, arrest, and injure people. I once heard a man saying that, a week after killing Moataz Zawahreh, the Israeli forces also shot at and destroyed the mural in his commemoration. They killed him and then they destroyed his memorial and memory.

36The Palestinian graffiti movement is intimately linked to the shuhada, in the very form it takes, as well as in the motivation behind the painters’ involvement in this practice. Indeed, the vast majority of the figurative murals on the walls of the camp represent the shuhada. In the interviews conducted, many of the graffiti artists shared that they in fact started painting after the death of one of their friends. In light of these observations, it was essential to give a specific place to this theme within the film.

37That is why I (Clémence Lehec) shared my wish with Tamara already before the film was shot to have three particular sequences, two of which were thought out as a mirror image around the question of the shuhada. I wanted to create a parallel between two murals: one located at the entrance of the camp and showing the names of all the villages from which the inhabitants of Dheisheh come from, and the other one located in the heart of the camp showing a shahid surrounded by all the names of the shuhada from the camp. The visual litany created in those murals were captured by close-up shots taken with a steady-cam, which made it possible to scan these works in detail.

38I would like to explain the construction of another sequence on the shuhada. Shot in close-up, it presents the eyes of several shuhada before ending on a traveling shot which reveals a mural of several shuhada side by side, ending on a black silhouette in the centre where there is a question mark (Cf. picture) asking “who is next?”. The murals on the villages were filmed in a similar way, with a steady-cam, so it is through the visual grammar itself that the parallel is drawn between the two murals. All these artistic choices were guided by the reflections I had made during my Master’s degree, when I was doing the portrait of a Palestinian artist.

Picture 1: Tamara Abu Laban filming a mural representing shuhada.

39These considerations of cinematographic choices should not obscure the fact that this sequence on the shuhada was the subject of an important debate between Tamara and myself, based on the anticipation of the meaning that it would be given by different audiences. In response to a scientific injunction, I took it upon myself to try to see clearly the definition that can be given of a shahid within the Palestinian population. After lengthy bibliographical research, I found this one: “The vagueness of the notion of ‘martyr’ in Palestinian society strangely places all the dead on the same level. Thus, one calls both the non-combatant civilian who has fallen under the bullets of Israeli soldiers and the suicide bomber who voluntarily takes his own life by inflicting it on others, ‘Shahid’“ (Bucaille 2003, 119)8. This definition is indicative of the distancing of the religious element in the apprehension of this term within Palestinian society, since the latter has, before any other connotation, a nationalist dimension.

40And indeed, before wondering about the way the shuhada theme will be put into images, we have already encountered a translation problem. The Arabic term shahid in the singular and shuhada in the plural, when translated by the term “martyr” in French or English (as it is the case in the film’s subtitles), refers directly to a religious imaginary. It is a practical concern that made us keep the term translated within the subtitles, but it was necessary to convey the idea that, within the Palestinian context, the understanding of the term shahid does not primarily appeal to a religious referent, but rather to a political and national referent. At the same time, it was necessary to find a way of bringing these elements to the screen that was not too didactic, since the film is also aimed at a Palestinian audience that is already familiar with the understanding of the term shahid. We would like to come back to this process.

41During a first editing process, we had inserted a piece of cardboard stipulating Laetitia Bucaille’s definition in white on a black background. We left this element within the film for a while, even though Tamara was already telling me that she was not sure that this definition was the right one and that it might not be well received by the Palestinian audience. I was a little bit stuck by the scientific imperative and the double purpose of our film, which was to reach both Palestinian and foreign audiences. We finally made the decision to remove this definitional cardboard for two reasons. The first one is that I agreed with Tamara that I might not be able to assume the accuracy of this definition. The second, which is related to the first, is the didactic tone that the presence of this cardboard piece would have made us adopt in the film. Three context cards and a conclusion card already framed the documentary and I wanted to keep the meaning of the film open, in order to leave the freedom of interpretation to the viewer.

42Apart from the removal of this cardboard, we also made a modification in the sound editing of the film. Indeed, the last part of the sequence dealing with the shuhada ends with the interview of Ahmed Saleh. At the time we recorded this interview, in the street, the call to prayer was resounding in the camp. Since the whole film, in its vast majority, only uses sound in (that is, sound recorded at the same time as the image), Tamara let the sound at the end of the interview close the sequence—that is, the call to prayer. From the point of view of a European audience, it seemed to me that ending this sequence in this way was tantamount to pointing out the religious character of the shahid, an element that my bibliographical research and my understanding of the phenomenon had indicated that it was not of primary importance. To use the original sound at that point was an appeal to a European audience, to an imagination charged with religious symbolism, which would most probably lead (all the more so in a French context) to the condemnation rather than to the understanding of a complex phenomenon rooted in a particular context of anti-colonial struggle.

43Removing the definition on the one hand, and intervening on the sound on the other hand, were two key elements that allowed us both to be satisfied with the editing of this sequence. In addition to those negotiations, the debates over the use of “shocking images” were even more pronounced, which will be discussed in the next and final part.

Shocking images? For what purposes?

44Filming in high quality gives an impression that the film is good, but personally I like to see videos shot with a hand camera, shaky and with low light, because I feel that the documentary is more real when people did not spend lots of time on a good location and good camera, etc. In the editing room, Clémence told me she had pictures she took at night with the young group paintings on the walls of the camp, and I said yes, why not, let’s make a sequence with these photos.

45To my point of view, it is not convincing in a movie to hear a story as a testimony—just a talking head—with no footage that can complete the cinematographic language. So, in many parts of our movie people describe the Israeli raids into the camp and how dangerous it can be, and the audience feels a need to see what this means visually. When Clémence told me that the scientific community or the European audience could think that the scenes showing those invasions were shocking, I told her: this is nothing compared to our lives, maybe they could be shocking for a European citizen but, and it is hard to say, we and our children are facing this shocking reality on an everyday basis.

46Finally, I would like to come back to the reasons why we inserted, within the documentary, images of military invasion in the refugee camp filmed by Dheisheh inhabitants with mobile phones. We kept them in our movie despite the debates about the scientific character of such mobile phone images that have emerged within the scientific community to which I belonged, both about their provenance and use, in that their grammar supposedly convenes the militant repertoire. Indeed, the use of shocking images is widespread in the frame of a human rights advocacy perspective and in the media. The visual grammar of those two fields, theoretically, should not be imported to the scientific sphere, which has to adopt a critical posture. Nonetheless, it was important for Tamara to show images of the Israeli raids within the camp that illegally penetrate into the private space of the houses. I use the term “illegal” and “raid” deliberately, since the Dheisheh camp is located in an area theoretically entirely controlled by the Palestinian Authority (Area A), so the presence of Israeli soldiers in this area is considered to be illegal.

47This approach is part of a broader perspective of documenting violations committed by the Israeli army, which is done by both Palestinian and Israeli activists, since the non-governmental organisation B’tselem, for example, distributes cameras in the West Bank to enable residents to document these situations. It can also be found in Palestinian documentary cinema, as in the film Five Broken Cameras (Burnat and Davidi 2011). From this point of view, camera footage exposing Israeli practices and human rights violations may counter the imbalanced power relations between the settler and colonised, keeping the Israeli violence in check. The use of several languages in our documentary, in this case speech, through oral testimony and the visual, with the image, seems necessary for the construction of a statement that seeks to constitute evidence of its credibility. After many discussions, I realised that it is therefore common in Tamara’s perspective to use this type of image, which are part of a militant approach inherent to the situation. It is precisely the use of these images as “evidence” that is problematic in the scientific process.

48For my part, the prospect of using images deemed all the more “shocking” by a public that is not accustomed to this colonial situation has proved problematic. Indeed, from a scientific point of view, the use of this type of image that directly appeals to emotions may seem contradictory to the scientific approach and the demand for neutrality, which appears as an imperative even in the critical field of research when working on Palestine. Their controversial potential lies in the fact that they are images made with mobile phones, filming the military power of the occupier from afar or in “hidden” camera. The use to be made of the images in scientific work, since they are reputed to have greater manipulative power than text (Mitchell 1996), requires certain precautions. Providing evidence for an argument through images is a practice that should be mistrusted, all the more in the context of research that questions images because of the potential manipulation that can be made of and through these objects. Thus, using shocking images in a scientific documentary could be considered unnecessary to prove the veracity of the subject in question. Nevertheless, we wanted to keep these images, less to prove our argument than to show a reality that is often not relayed. This involved taking certain precautions.

49In addition to the trust placed in Tamara, who collected these images from camp inhabitants and with a scientific approach, it was necessary for me to formally verify the source of these images by having the person who made them sign a contract stipulating that he or she was the author and agreed that we would broadcast them, in order to attest the source of these images. However, I have anonymised all sources in the credits, in order to protect him or her. Tamara and I discussed the usefulness of these images at length, and together we chose to include them in the documentary with the knowledge of the potential scientific controversy they could generate, also because they address the effects on the spectators in the first instance. I wish here to assume the contradiction in which these images seem to situate us, because it is also a question of undertaking collaborative research, which involves compromises and choices necessarily oriented by our different positions, views, and perspectives on a situation. The existence of this contradiction within the documentary takes into account the asperities of collaboration, and the difficulties in constructing a discourse that addresses both people who live this situation on a daily basis and people who are very far from this context.

Conclusion

50In conclusion, we would like to come back to this project of documentary co-realisation in the context of research—as a way of co-producing knowledge, but also as a way of building a common space, admittedly ephemeral, but that lasted at least the time of the research. This result is based on one main idea emanating from experimental geography, according to which any act of cultural or intellectual production is an act that produces space (Paglen 2008). The very form of the practice that is set up by artists or researchers thus participates in the creation of space. Most of the time, the space built by the research is not questioned in itself. In the frame of a geographical research project, we thought it was necessary to try to understand how space has been built throughout the whole project, since it is one of the results of the research that has been permitted by the use of visual methodology, i.e., documentary co-production.

51This chapter, in itself, is a proof of the argument we are putting forward: academic writing as a sole result of research does not allow us to go to the end of the sharing process, as evidenced by the fact that the French researcher’s words are more abundant here than those of the Palestinian filmmaker. On the other hand, the documentary film appears as a real possibility to share the construction of knowledge, by moving forward through compromises whose history, on the screen, fades away behind the common signature.

52When the researcher goes to the field that he/she is studying, he/she always knows that he/she can leave it, unlike the respondents, especially Palestinian refugees who live under a military occupation that restricts their right to mobility (Romani 2016). This privilege should be taken into account and reflected upon when considering field research in a specific space and time, since it may influence the dynamics with interlocutors and the knowledge production process. Equally, it is important to recognise that all research constructs space and time, the form of which depends on the way in which the research is conducted. This is why—and even more important when conducting research in field of geography and, more specifically, on borders—it is obligatory to ask oneself about the specific space that the research design has produced.

53While working together in Bethlehem for the shooting and in Geneva for the editing, we tried to balance our use of space to make it more fluid. Tamara Abu Laban traveling to Geneva to work was a kind of border crossing, when you know that we are not subject to the same degree of frontier. That is to say that because of our nationalities, we both live different travel experiences, i.e., more or less fluid, fast, and expensive travel conditions and possibilities. From this point of view, the travel of a French citizen in the Israeli-Palestinian space is largely facilitated and does not require any prior steps, unlike the travel of the holder of a Palestinian identity paper in Europe, which requires prior steps—to take out insurance, to obtain (by paying for it and thanks to an invitation letter) a visa, to pass through Jordan to be able to reach an airport, etc. All these elements are part of a border system that is much more diffuse than material. It is this system, aimed at hindering the freedom of movement of the Palestinians, that we wanted to cross, allowing for a short period of time to make our journeys to find the common time needed to finalise the documentary movie.

54Given the fact that the documentary is co-directed, we both share the same power over the film. In a way, where it is broadcasted and where we are sometimes invited to answer questions from the audience, it is the reopening of this common space that occurs each time. The testimony and the knowledge we bring on Palestinian graffiti is constantly subject to co-construction through our two voices.