BERLIN: Haunted by his own time behind bars, Palestinian director Raed Andoni recreated a notorious Israeli interrogation center — and has ex-prisoners re-enact experiences in a bid to set their demons free.
In the running for best documentary at the Berlin film festival, Andoni’s “Istiyad Ashbah” (Ghost Hunting) examines the rarely documented collective trauma suffered by former Palestinian prisoners.
“In Palestinian society, to survive detention and interrogation is like a rite of passage, you either come out a hero or you come out totally broken,” the celebrated Ramallah-based filmmaker told AFP this week after the film’s Berlinale premiere.
“And then people compare notes: how many days without sleep? How long in solitary?” the 45-year-old said.
Having been imprisoned himself in his youth, he said he remained “haunted by flashbacks” such as the sound of doors slamming shut and the feeling of a fabric bag being pulled over his head.
Shot over seven weeks in a hangar in the West Bank town of Ramallah, the film brings together around a dozen former detainees of all ages and backgrounds, who are asked to recreate the notorious Russian Compound jail in west Jerusalem from memory.
The participants rebuild the detention center in painstaking detail, from the size of their cells to the color of the tiles and even the pulley they say was used to lift inmates off the ground during what they described as torture sessions.
Slowly they bring the place of their nightmares back to life — and as the walls go up, the memories come bubbling back to the surface, forcing the men to confront their memories and breaking taboos in the process.
“I use everything I can in the film to help them dig into their subconscience,” Andoni said, explaining that he wanted to peel away layer after layer of repression to find “the ghost inside.”
For some of the ex-detainees it was too much and they walked away from the project.
“I told everyone from the first day of shooting that you have the right to quit,” he said, adding that there were psychologists on set to provide emotional support.
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