The filmmaker who moved back home

Hany Abu-Assad, Cannes award-winning director of ‘Omar,’ a Palestinian romantic thriller, talks about his past — and future — in his hometown of Nazareth

Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center

  • Looking over Hany Abu-Assad's shoulder at a view of Nazareth (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
    Looking over Hany Abu-Assad's shoulder at a view of Nazareth (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
  • 'Omar' director Hany Abu-Assad is nervously awaiting news of the Oscar nominees (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
    'Omar' director Hany Abu-Assad is nervously awaiting news of the Oscar nominees (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
  • Nazareth from above (photo credit: Moshe Shai/Flash 90)
    Nazareth from above (photo credit: Moshe Shai/Flash 90)
  • A nun and a priest pass by the Basilica of the Annunciation, part of the Nazareth scenery for Abu-Assad, a Moslem raised in Christian Nazareth (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash 90)
    A nun and a priest pass by the Basilica of the Annunciation, part of the Nazareth scenery for Abu-Assad, a Moslem raised in Christian Nazareth (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash 90)

Hany Abu-Assad sat back in his rattan cafe chair, idly surveying the motley assortment of people walking by, from flocks of Russian tourists and habit-wearing nuns to the blue-polo-shirted local teenagers slowly making their way to school, earbuds firmly in place, books held loosely by their sides.

“I was born not far from here,” said the director in his slightly hoarse voice, gesturing down the main street of Nazareth. “My school was behind that church,” pointing a finger towards Mary’s Well, one of the central tourist destinations. “Nazareth was just a village then; everyone knew everyone. I was very young when I started to walk from the house to school, but this place has changed a lot through the years.”

So has Abu-Assad, it’s fair to say. The 51-year-old director lived away from this Christian Arab enclave for some 25 years, but says he’s back for good in his hometown, where his aging mother and extended family still reside. It was during those years away, first in Holland and more recently in Los Angeles, that Abu-Assad built his career. But it’s his films about Nazareth, the place with the people he loves most, that have won him his highest accolades.

Right now, the movie receiving all the attention is “Omar,” his recent romantic thriller about Palestinians in the West Bank, which won the Jury Prize at its recent premiere in Cannes. Abu-Assad was living in LA when he first developed the idea, but it grew out of his own history and that of his friends back home in the West Bank and Nazareth.

It’s clear that for this emigre returned home, while Nazareth and the West Bank are the places from which he ran, they are also the locations that ultimately inspire his best work.

It’s true, he said, nodding.

“I lived abroad for 25 years, but I still felt like I was part of the Palestinian story,” he said, remembering “humiliating experiences” at the airport and checkpoints, and when his aunt couldn’t visit her dying mother because of border and residence issues.

“It’s a very, very private thing,” said Abu-Assad, who speaks Dutch and English fluently from his years living abroad. “It’s hard to know that any Jew can come here and have more rights than me. And even though I tried to escape this, it’s still my problem.”

The big screen

The director’s love for movies began some 40 years ago during the double features held each Sunday in the local theater, a kind of Nazarene Cinema Paradisio where some 4,000 kids vied for the same 400 seats each week. Most homes lacked their own television in Abu-Assad’s childhood of the 1960s and 1970s, so the weekly feature generally included an Egyptian flick coupled with an American western or Indian Bollywood feature — all potent fare for innocent kids living a small-town life.

“We loved the drama,” he remembered, laughing. “There was always a kid abandoned by his family, who then becomes successful and takes revenge.”

Abu-Assad was accompanied each week by an uncle who was just eight years his senior. They would snag prime front-row seats in the balcony, thanks to their neighborhood affiliation and in accordance with the strict hierarchy of seating upheld in the local theater.

“It was a major experience in our lives,” he said. “We couldn’t really understand the English and the subtitles were in Hebrew, which I didn’t understand either, but I loved those movies.”

When Abu-Assad turned 18 and wanted to figure out what to do with his life that would make use of his sensitive artistic tendencies, he figured that films were a good option as the art form he knew best. But he first ended up in Amsterdam after high school, following the same uncle into an aeronautics program at a Dutch college and having been mesmerized by sexy advertisements of pilots emerging from cockpits “like movie stars.”

Abu-Assad needed to leave his hometown in order to have a better perspective on what stories it could tell (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
Abu-Assad needed to leave his hometown in order to have a better perspective on what stories it could tell (photo credit: Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)

“Everyone knows that if you’re an F-16 pilot, any girl will have you,” he said. “I did it to please my parents.”

He was neither a pilot nor a particularly academically successful aeronautics engineer, but he was enamored of Amsterdam. It was a city that offered the opportunity to explore more than just mainstream art and literature but rather culture on the margins, like films by Karasawa and Bertolucci — all new to Abu-Assad, the Muslim Arab from Nazareth.

He also credits his own powers of imagination as the asset that allowed him to succeed in Dutch society.

“It’s a [certain kind of] power to see stories wherever you look, because people are different from you,” said Abu-Assad, who, while coming from a wealthy family, earned his own spending money during those early years, washing dishes and floors in local restaurants. “You can analyze the people and reconstruct them, and yet not let them make their own image of you. You ‘get’ them, by being an outsider, and it’s about knowledge.”

He only worked for two years as an engineer before returning to Nazareth to work for his father. Back home he met a Gazan filmmaker and became his assistant, eventually going on out on his own and making more than 14 movies, including six documentaries.

The workplace

There are several Abu-Assad films that stand out for the general audience, e.g., the feature film “Rana’s Wedding” (2002), about a Palestinian woman whose father wants to choose her groom, which was filmed during the Second Intifada; and “Nazareth 2000,” a documentary that veers back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, which he pegs as his personal favorite. His 2006 film, “Paradise Now,” about two would-be suicide bombers, won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign language film and received an Oscar nomination in the same category. Now, his 2013 film, “Omar,” was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize.

“Omar” happened, said Abu-Assad, because of his experiences in LA, where he ended up in 2006 after being invited by Focus Features to direct for them.

“If you get an invite like that, you go,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the realities of Los Angeles didn’t quite match up to what the seasoned director had envisioned, and he found himself making what he termed a “B-action movie” that resisted most attempts for improvement.

“I was stuck with this movie,” said Abu-Assad. “I kept asking myself why is this movie going to fail, why isn’t it working, and it was because it was all artificial. The actors, the heroes, the action, nothing came from true life, nothing was believable, and believe me, we tried.”

He went ahead with the project, primarily because he needed the money, but woke up one night at four in the morning thinking that he had to write a story that he wanted to tell, a story that had affected him.

It took just four hours to outline the basics of “Omar,” based on the experiences of a friend of his who had been captured by Israeli forces who then used the secrets of his life to try and force him to become a collaborator.

After writing the script, he put it aside, and completed the B-action thriller film before returning to Nazareth and spending a year raising money, but only from Palestinians. His producer, Waleed Zuaiter, a Hollywood actor born in California and raised in Kuwait by Palestinian parents, told Variety, “We reached out to everyone [for funding]. Like, if you were one-eighth Palestinian, we came to you; for us, there were no borders.”

The $2 million film was made in the West Bank and Nazareth using only Palestinian crew members, another first for a Palestinian film.

“This was all a challenge,” said Abu-Assad, adding that he could have easily raised European funding — but not American money, as he was told the Jewish Hollywood establishment wouldn’t support a pro-Palestinian film. “If you take just Palestinian money, you don’t have to compromise on any level. European money always means a European crew, and you end up spending so much on travel and hotels and per diem and not spending that on the screen, so that’s a compromise.”

Now, as “Omar” heads out on the festival and movie theater circuit, he believes the movie deserves its praise.

“That makes me happy because I feel we can become more and more independent,” he said.

For now, Abu-Assad is already thinking about his the next film, a romantic comedy based on an experience he had at a family wedding several days ago.

“I want to concentrate on my next movie,” he said. “I always need a project coming up once I’m done with the last one. You can’t focus too much on what you’re already completed.”

And with that, he drained his cup of jasmine tea, and headed up the stairs, back to where he came from.

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