COMMENTS FROM SCANDAR COPTI AND YARON SHANIORIGINS OF THE PROJECT
Yaron: The basic plot of AJAMI was already developed during my film studies at Tel Aviv University. The idea was to show different stories one after the other. Back then it had nothing to do with Arabs or Ajami. I knew that since the idea dealt with different perspectives, making it a Jewish-Arab story would make it very interesting. But like an everyday Jewish Israeli, I didn’t know much about Arab society in Israel. I didn’t know more than a few words in Arabic as most Israeli Jews don’t speak Arabic at all. The actual screenplay had to wait until 2002, when I met Scan- dar. Back then I was the director of the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival, and Scandar was making a short film for one of our special productions. When the festival ended, I asked him if he would like to do something bigger – writing a feature film together. Scandar was delighted, and we started working together in August 2002.
Scandar: The commitment to work together was intuitive and proved to be very fruitful, even though this was a project involv- ing a complicated conjunction of identities and perspectives. It could never have been done by just one of us alone, and without the will to listen and relate to new ideas and perspectives of the other side. That is why the work revolved mainly on hanging out together, and gaining a strong friendship and trust. It wasn’t just centered around writing sessions. In the beginning it was more about telling each other stories we knew that would even- tually become the stories in AJAMI.
WRITING TOGETHER
Scandar: On the mechanical side, once we decided we had a good story that could fit to the plot, one of us would write some- thing and we would discuss it together. We used the reality of the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa as the basis. Most of the stories were encountered in our everyday life in and outside Ajami. We had to adapt these stories to a very precise structure, all the while keeping them true to reality, out of respect to the real people of Ajami and to our method of working. We had to predict the actors’ reactions to different situations that were known to every resident of the Ajami neighborhood (such as dealing with a police arrest of someone from the neighborhood).
Yaron: Yes, the script had to be very precise and very true to reality. The scenes had to be exactly how things happen in real- ity. If they weren’t, everything would go wrong in the shoot. In order to be sure that our eventual non-professional actors would react according to the script, we had to know these characters very well and also the nature of these scenes, exactly how they happen in real life.
THE TRAGIC AMBIVALENCE OF HUMAN REALITY
Scandar & Yaron: We wrote AJAMI because we wanted to tell the story of people we both know, and through them, perhaps con- vey something about all of us – the tragic ambivalence of human reality. There is no location we know of that better expresses the tragic collision of "worlds” than the streets of Ajami. Ajami is a melting pot of cultures, nationalities and opposite human perspectives. Our main goal was to show this reality in the most sincere way. Our stories are inspired by real events. Our actors come from the real streets and houses of this human environ- ment and not from acting schools. Over the course of an intense 10-month acting workshop with over 300 people, the partici-
pants "became” the characters portrayed in AJAMI. This, along with a documentary-inspired way of shooting, show how surpris- ingly real fiction can be.
REALITY STRONGER THAN IMAGINATION
Scandar: In regards to the acting in AJAMI, our philosophy was that "reality can be stronger and more interesting than imagi- nation.” Directing actors according to written scripts can be limited and superficial compared to reality. With AJAMI, we wanted to widen the boundaries of dramatic expression in a fic- tion film – to bring it closer to a pure and truthful depiction of the real world. During the filming of AJAMI, we tried to bring the actors into a conscious state similar to what happens in real life – a state in which we don’t know what will happen or what is expected of us. The actors reacted spontaneously, without writ- ten text or any awareness of plot. The words that came out of their mouths were generated from their hearts and not by a scriptwriter. They felt emotions without knowing that it was in- tended in the script.
Yaron: The method of working with the actors relies on the truthfulness of every detail. Unlike many fiction films, where you can say, "Leave it. It’s only a movie. It’s not real life...” In this case, it was about real life. Our goal was to make the actors behave like the written characters, without them knowing it. Our actors were not given scripts. They didn’t know where we were heading. We threw them into real live situations, and they re- acted spontaneously, like they would in the real world.
A 10-MONTH WORKSHOP
Scandar: None of the actors in AJAMI had ever studied acting or appeared in a film before. Many of them come from a tough background, where violence and crime are part of everyday life.
Each actor in AJAMI was chosen according to his or her similar- ity to the character, in terms of personality and personal history. In the course of a 10-month workshop, the actors went through a psychological journey, experiencing the private history of their characters through role-playing and discussions.
Yaron: Our workshop started with some 300 participants. Many deserted along the way, but enough stayed on and became en- thusiastic partners. By the seventh month, we basically had our main cast and the workshops continued primarily with them. In the workshops, the participants didn’t learn about text, goals, mise-en-scene or acting tricks. The focus was the psychological journey of the characters through dramatic role-playing to fully understand the character. Eventually, the actors deeply identi- fied with their characters as an extension of his or her own per- sonality. When the cameras started rolling, something magical happened – the actors forgot that they were in a fictional situa- tion. It was as if they were not able to see the cameras around them. For a moment, their minds believed that what was hap- pening was real. The emotions that came out of it exceeded our wildest imagination.
ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
Yaron: The actors in AJAMI were not given dialogue to learn, not even a script to read. And there were no rehearsals. Many film- makers have used the element of surprise for certain scenes. AJAMI is based entirely on this principal. Throughout the film, the emotions you see are genuine. But unlike other improvisa- tional experiments, AJAMI had a very precise script centered on a specific plot, thus requiring a precise emotional structure. So the acting had to create spontaneous emotions that would go hand in hand with the pre-written script. This was achieved by bringing the actors to each character’s emotional and psycho- logical state as written in the script.
Scandar: The actors had to act and feel what was written. With- out being aware of it, they ended up acting out a story that was completely pre-written. The result is a fiction film which shows "real” people acting and feeling "real” emotions in "real” situ- ations, although they were never aware how they were secretly being directed according to a pre-written script.
DRAMA IN 23 DAYS
Scandar & Yaron: AJAMI was basically shot in 23 days. The whole dramatic content had to be shot in one period during which the scenes were shot chronologically. The only scene that was com- pleted out of the 23-day period of shooting was the parking lot scene which had to be shot in a more classical way. So we did have 5 additional completion days, but this was more or less second unit footage.
CONFUSING FICTION WITH REALITY
Yaron: AJAMI was shot scene by scene, chronologically like it was a real chain of events in the real world. The film crew had to jump from one location to the other and back, so that each ac- tor would experience his personal story just like in real life. That way, each actor acted a scene after being charged with the emotions of the previous ones. This progression created a very strong and clear dramatic logic in the mind and hearts of the actors, and generated emotions as in real life.
Scandar: The actors often confused a fictional scene with a real live event. Sometimes it became so real and personal, that we had to physically stop the scene so that no one would be injured. These real and spontanious emotions were captured by the doc- umentary-style camerawork. For example, in the opening scene when young Nasri’s neighbor gets shot by unknown assassins, none of the actors knew anything about the shooting. When the kid got shot, the emotions of horror and surprise overwhelmed all of us. A woman from the neighborhood who witnessed the shooting began crying because her own son had been murdered the same way in real life.
THE POLICE
Yaron: The policemen in the film were played by real former po- licemen. There is a lot of hostility and mistrust between Ajami’s Arab residents and the Israeli police. It is fueled by the national tensions between the Jewish establishment and the Arab minor- ity in Israel. Eran Naim, who fought Palestinians as a young sol- dier in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and who was a real-life policeman, can easily relate to that. In AJAMI, when Eran’s char- acter arrests an Arab drug dealer, he is attacked by young Arabs from the neighborhood. When we shot the scene, Eran wasn’t informed about what was going to happen. As a former police- man, he did what he was trained to do – arrest a criminal on the street. That’s when the young Arabs came out to defend their friend. We didn’t need to direct anyone – the scripted violence was inevitable.
THE FRESHNESS OF THE ACTING
Scandar: Every take was unique and couldn’t be reproduced. The best take would be the first one, where everyone would really react with their hearts. After the first take, the actors would know what was about to happen and the whole idea of "living it” would not work anymore. We made a second take only when the outcome of the first take did not go with our plans.
Yaron: In order to set the scene in a different direction, we changed the stimulus, like secretly giving a certain actor a dif- ferent psychological motivation. With this new motivation, the actor would go into the second take, suprising the other actors
with a new behavior, and setting everything onto a different course. This way we maintained the freshness of the acting. It was like a first take.
Scandar: Most of the time we shot the whole scene in one take with two cameras. We had to manipulate the set in order to limit the posibilities of the action, so that the two cameras would not get in the way of one another. It took a lot of preparation and planning.
HOURS AND HOURS OF FOOTAGE
Scandar & Yaron: The first assembly was about 40 hours of multi-camera footage, which is 80 hours of single camera. From this point we had numerous posibilities for each scene, like in documentary editing. Sometimes we had takes over 30 minutes long. In these takes we had so many options and directions. The entire editing process took about a year. The edit was like ex- ploring the dramatic potential from scratch. It was like polish- ing a diamond from a huge chunk of coal. The original script seems naive and simple when compared to the finished film, even to the rough footage itself.
GENERATED AND GOVERNED BY POLITICS
Scandar & Yaron: From the beginning, AJAMI was a project that was going to be about the human side of this community. We felt that dealing with the human side is the only way to address the big issues that are behind everything. But all the social prob lems revealed in the stories in AJAMI are generated and gov- erned by politics.
IT TAKES TWO
Yaron: Throughout the entire seven-year process of the making of AJAMI, we worked closely together. We rarely divided the work between us, only when there was no other way. No one ever de- cided something without discussing it with the other. If we had not been two, we wouldn’t have succeeded in making such a rule-breaking project – a complex plot involving hundreds of non-actors working without a script, a fiction film shot with two cameras on a very tight and crazy shooting schedule, and in chronological order! I learned to speak Arabic, and I met a lot of amazing people. I was exposed to an amazing world that I never had access to before.
Scandar: Probably neither one of us could have been strong enough to face such a project alone. If one of us broke down, then the other was there for support. Not every project suits this kind of partnership. This was a very unique project and we are proud of what we did together. That’s the most important thing.