What happens when a well-intentioned American TV producer wants her Israeli and Palestinian friends to bond? A half-assed music group and a documentary called The Promised Band. And made by and starring several queer women, the film has a queer and feminist bent to it.
We caught up with out director and cast member Jen Heck and star Lina Qadri, shortly after the film’s premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival. We talked about the risks involved in making the movie, the realities it revealed, what makes it part of “New New Queer Cinema” and more.
photos courtesy The Promised Band
AfterEllen.com: Lina, at several points during the film you mention that safety is a concern for you. Knowing that, why did you agree to partake at all?
Lina Qadri: I agreed to do the film because I think it’s a good way to bring this subject, the conflict—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—another perspective that people haven’t seen before. I think risk is everywhere. It’s not only in the Palestinian conflict. So I really didn’t mind just to take the risk and just to have this experience and to build a bridge and to make other people just see the context of another perspective: a human bridge between friends.
AE: When you say “another perspective,” what do you mean by that?
LQ: It’s not common to have a good relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, especially the Palestinians who live in the West Bank. Because we don’t really see the Israelis as civilians, we just see them as torture. So having to deal with the Israelis as civilians and as women and men, it was a really different perspective.
Jen Heck: The reality is friendships like this are totally criminalized, by default, because of the way the borders work. And we started to feel at a certain point, and one of the characters says this in the movie, that people are intentionally kept apart. So it’s always about the monster in the room because you’re not ever seeing anybody face to face. I think when you actually see people face to face, you really recognize aspects of yourself in that person. Which is terrifying and actually threatening to a lot of people and to ourselves, but at the same time it’s totally life changing. That mythology of hatred kind of goes away.
AE: Lina, how aware were you of Jen’s intentions for the film?
LQ: Jen believed that she could do something different. We talked hours and hours continuously, and we had good conversations, and I felt Jen was coming with a different message. I think she believed that there is something different and that there should be another way to do this kind of, “I need to represent the image in a better way.” Because most of the time we only see the conflict.
So I think that Jen believed that there is a story that should be told. She saw the situation; she came there, she experienced the lies on both sides. She was really convinced that there was something happening that people are not aware of.
JH: A lot of what the movie does is about showing this, telling this story through the lens of our characters, who are women, many of whom are queer, and their goal here is to make a song together. Nobody is walking into this movie trying to convince the other person to take on a specific ideology or forcing anything on them. It comes up, naturally, but it comes up in a very human way.
AE: I’ve seen this movie described as being part of the New New Queer Cinema. What’s meant by that, Jen?
JH: I think what that means is that queer cinema doesn’t have to be about queer characters doing queer things necessarily. It’s about that perspective and telling a story through that lens without it having to be about it or having aspects of the queer experience tokenized. We wanted to bring that in more overtly in the film, but at the end of the day, it’s not central to the message of the film and the message of the film is really important and shouldn’t be diluted. It’s subtext to what the film is. And it’s a huge part of what makes the movie possible because you have queer people in the film and making the film who are by nature seeing things differently because of their own oppressions that they go through, their own diversity, their own openness to things just by nature of who they are. And that made the movie possible. It’s such a huge part of what it is.
I want it to be part of the conversation after the fact, too, because I think, as time goes on, people’s comfort level talking about this— whether they talk about it on camera or all of that—there’s a safety aspect to bringing any sort of queer ideas into the film that, story aside, we also had to deal with that. But I think New New Queer Cinema more than anything else is about telling stories through this lens and bringing that sensibility to it without necessarily having to make it about that.
This is the first movie that I’ve made that’s been out in the festival circuit that doesn’t have overt queer themes to it, so I’m curious to see how audiences react to it—if it’s discounted because it’s not overt. I feel like that would be unfortunate because this is such a central part of how the story is told. I would hope that people were open to seeing that side of it without it having to be about that. So to me, it’s sort of experimental in that way. And that was a choice that we made while we were making the film because it was important for us to stay on message with the movie to make sure that it was accessible to everyone.
AE: There’s a pretty prominent male figure in the film as well: a rabbi. Lina, with you being the band’s lead singer and this rabbi insisting that he couldn’t sing with women, what did you think of Jen’s insistence that he join the band? What would it have meant for you if he were in the band?
LQ: I think everything would be different for me. Maybe I would just not continue with them. I don’t know. It would not be convenient. And something else—I was kind of certain that he wasn’t going to come. In one way or another, I felt that he was not coming. So that’s why I was really easy about it.
AE: Jen, some people who watch the film will see your insistence on having the rabbi join as being a bit perplexing. Why did you feel his participation was important?
JH: Well I think that the band is kind of a metaphor for the whole society and each character kind of has their own role in the band and it can mirror the role that they play in the society. And so I thought it was important to include him as part of that mosaic because the band potentially fails for the same reasons that the society fails. And I didn’t want to be the person to get him out of it. He’s saying one thing, and I think he genuinely wants to do that to some extent—there’s a real conflict there—but at the same time, by virtue of who he is as a religious person following the rules, he can’t do that thing. And I did see an analogy between his situation within the band and the religious take and the religious place in the conversation when it comes to the peace conversation. Like we want peace, but here are these caveats. And it blocks progress.
AE: I want to talk about the risk factor now. By repeatedly going into Area A with your Israeli friends, you were all risking arrest. And there could have been problems for Lina as well. Even the idea of the band itself could have been dismantled as a farce if anyone had asked you to play. So why did you still risk it?
JH: It wasn’t really my decision, first of all. I was facilitating it, but at no time was I necessarily in control of what we did. When we were in the West Bank, Lina was usually determining where we could go and how far we could go from her house and stuff like that. And everybody trusted her. And when we were in Tel Aviv, the Israelis were in control. When we were in Tel Aviv, Lina had a permit, so it was a little bit different in terms of getting stuck at a checkpoint or anything like that. But I think the reason why people just moved forward with what we were doing is because they started to see that what was happening was important.
There was that constant awareness: how are we looking in our surroundings? Are we making ourselves vulnerable? Are we making Lina vulnerable when we leave? And honestly, the band, and the cover story of the band, more than getting through checkpoints or being disarming in that way, it was more about people watching us get out of our car and go into Lina’s house and having all of her neighbors watch and we had these props that sort of had their own message—a non-threatening message—by virtue of what they were. And they’re very visible, so I hope that sort of curtailed some of that.
AE: Lina, there’s a scene in the film where someone asks you a question I’d been wondering and your answer is very interesting. I’m going to ask it again in case it’s changed. Didn’t you find it a bit naïve of this American to come in and think she could bring together these different people—history, religion, permits, etc. be damned?
LQ: No, I didn’t find it naïve. Naïve is not the word, actually. I think I felt that she wanted to do something good. She wanted to bring people together, and she wanted to bring women together. She wanted to bring us together, the Palestinians and the Israelis. And even if it’s a small circle, at least she felt that she wanted to do that.
AE: Some of your band members left or didn’t join at all, most of you never really mastered your instruments, and you’re still in the situation where you have limited opportunities to visit each other. That all said, do you still feel like you accomplished something?
JH: These small relationships are something. Telling our story honestly I think has affected audiences. This is bringing them into the conflict in a way that they haven’t seen before.
I’m trying to make a film where people aren’t automatically defensive because I think that’s what happens a lot. There’s an obvious sort of agenda being pushed, or a side being taken, and, again, everybody in the movie obviously has opinions about where they stand on the conflict or the politics of the conflict, but it’s not so much about pushing that. It’s about genuinely trying to understand.
AE: Has this caused any problems for you, Lina, now that the movie is being screened? Have you had any feedback back home?
LQ: Not yet. Not yet. But you know what? I’m not really ashamed of what I did. I’m so proud of this movie.
AE: Finally, what are your hopes for this film?
JH: The thing that I hope more than anything, maybe this makes me a bad marketing person or whatever, but I love seeing Lina see the audience reaction and seeing how much her sharing her story affected people. People in the audience cried. People gave her standing ovations. It gives so much meaning to the experience for her and for the other cast members as well when they get an opportunity to see it with an audience. Because people really were so generous with who they are, who they were at the time, with going on this discovery together. Like why? Why did they trust me with this? Because they wanted to make music? No. Because they wanted to figure out if there’s a better way.
They’re still vulnerable to this day as the movie comes out in Israel or in Palestine. They will be vulnerable, they will be targeted possibly, but there’s a reason, and there’s a message that got out there. And it’s really amazing to see audiences connect to it.
The Promised Band is screening at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose on March 12 and will screen for Hands of Peace in Chicago on April 6. Visit the movie’s website to find out when it’ll be screening near you.
