Paydirt

Shoot postponed in Burj el Barajneh due to sudden unrest. My guy refused to let me come in Saturday, citing security issues. Wow, frustrating. I spent the day wondering if my aspirations to direct a film were misplaced, feeling like the world was conspiring against me.

Sunday, I woke up at 5:30 am, gave myself a kick in the ass, grabbed my camera and took a service taxi to the legendary Souk Al-Ahad. No "Ahad!" moments, but I met some sketchy people who were selling pigeons beneath a dank overpass. My fixer picked me up at 8 and we hit the road, bombing down the coast of the Mediterranean in his incredibly robust Beetle, driving at breakneck speeds. We cruised through all the checkpoints and finally arrived in Sour (Tyre), where we met up with Jaber, a program officer with a local human rights organization. Jaber seems to know just about everyone. After the necessary introductions and Arabic coffee (on the beautiful beach behind his house) we went to a busy marketplace in old Sour that could only be accessed by a small, nondescript passageway. Unreal. We had a quick lunch and discussed the plan for the day. Jaber told me about a man who keeps an archive of books and artifacts from pre-1948 Palestine. Fisk wrote an article about him; check it out. Mahmoud's museum was full of sad reminders of everyday life in a simpler time, from keys to people's homes in Galilee to seemingly banal household items stamped "made in Palestine". He gave an extraordinarily eloquent interview, recounting the day he fled his home and came to Lebanon in gripping detail.

We were scheduled to meet a young pigeon handler on the edge of Al-Buss camp at 4 pm, so we hustled our way down there and slipped in the side gate, where we met Mohammed and his flock. The sun was low in the sky, and as I climbed up the rickety ladder to their rooftop with 40 pounds of equipment on my houlders, I started to really get a sense of how crazy this project might become. On the roof, Mohammed whistled loudly at the birds as they swooped in circles over the camp, hurling pieces of dried lime from a Palestinian slingshot into the sky to drive them higher and higher. Over the wall of the camp, the Mediterranean sea sparkled in the waning light and a convoy of UNIFIL forces paraded past the banners for Amal and Hezbollah leaders.

Afterwards, my fixer was talking to a couple of the kids and asking about other pigeon handlers and one of them casually dropped a name: Deeb. I've been looking for Deeb for weeks now and was starting to think he was a mythical character. A self-styled pigeon king, Deeb is the guy who knows about the practice of sending messages by bird. After days and days of hearing that I was on a fool's errand, this was music to my ears.

Meeting Deeb made me realize how passionate pigeon fanciers are about their hobby - which for him, is a full-time job. he described in intricate detail the different features that make a bird more desireable, and told us about rich Beiruti fanciers coming to his house and offering untold sums of money for his flock. We were at his home for about an hour, and during that time, 5 people came by to talk pigeons. We'd hit the motherlode. That night, Firas and I drove haphazardly around Tyre, talking about the people we'd met, politics, love and life, partly lost, partly just exhilarated and exhausted by the mind blowing day we'd had.

We're returning on Wednesday and Friday to "shoot the messenger". Wow. And yes, in case you were wondering, that's a handmade pigeon tattoo on the guy's arm from when he was detained in the occupied territories.

Showtime

Over the weekend I met my first pigeon handler. I had been scouring an area near wealthy Ras Beirut looking for a cafe that I'd heard sold birds. I got a lot of weird looks going door-to-door, asking shopkeepers if they knew where I could find pigeons (and making appropriately ridiculous hand gestures at the same time). Finally, a car mechanic with wild eyes pumped my arm firmly and led me down a side street, around a corner and up the stairs of an apartment building to the roof. After reading about this phenomenon for so long, I was amazed to see it in action. These aren't your run of the mill street pigeons; these are Columba livia palaestinae. I was instantly stuck by how beautiful they look as they soar over the city in one big flock, directed by owner Abed, whistling and waving large bamboo poles to direct them. Abed gave me some tiny beaded angle bracelets, rings and bells that fit on the legs of his birds as a souvenir. More on this in another post, but let's just say I got some great footage over the weekend.

This week got off to a good start; I got a call from the army press office informing me that my permissions had come through. Incredibly, I was granted access to every camp I requested. After that I got my friend's driver Hisham to take me to Hezbollah's press office, where I explained what i would be doing and gave them copies of all my permissions. It was very telling to compare the business cards of the Ministry of Information (police), Army HQ and Hezbollah. Hezbollah's card was printed on heavy textured paper with a gold laminate. Bling. The others looked like something you print at home. I got a kick out of showing them to my friends who live here, who thought it was hilarious.

Later, I met with Firas, who will drive me to Tyre in his 1960's VW Beetle on Sunday to meet with a former militant turned human rights activist who will help me. From there I will visit Al-Bass and Rashidiyeh camps, and work my ass off. You can see factsheets on the camps at the UNRWA site.

The next day, I met Yassin for lunch; he's going to help me do sound and find me some characters for the work in Burj-el Barajneh. After our meeting, I went with him back to the camp to listen to his music and to get to know him better. I spent 5 hours in his studio, sitting through power outages, listening to some of the freshest arabic hip hop I've heard, desperate to shoot but without the necessary permissions from the camp leaders (tomorrow, they say). Yassin is one hell of a talented kid. He was explaining the lyrics of his music, and I was amazed by how he played with the language, interpreting and reinterpreting words that sound the same but mean different things in incredibly experimental ways. Check out his myspace page and send him props; he's going through the difficult process of applying for visas and permissions to go to school in Canada to master sound engineering. Cross your fingers, he deserves this chance.

As we walked through the checkpoint at the gates and into the camp, I looked up and saw three flocks of pigeons whirling like dervishes from three separate rooftops. The sight of it made me giddy with anticipation for the next 12 days. And man - what a place to film in. With such restricted access and so much tension in the camps, you feel privileged - if that word can even be applied to this situation - walking around and getting full Palestinian hospitality. It's difficult to describe how dire the living conditions are in the camps, and how resilient the inhabitants are. This is a place with a million stories and one long, sad history.

So, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I'll be back in there. It's incredible to think that the past week has just been legwork, bureaucracy and sitting down, talking to people and building relationships. I think I expected to jump off the plane and start shooting, the way I'm used to working as a news photographer. This film is a bigger commitment in every way, because the project has so many individual threads of complexity, and so much depends on being able to weave it all together.

I've got two moleskines stuffed with notes, reflections, ideas, interview questions and little-known facts to act as my shooting bible. i feel a little like a one-man band at the moment - director, production coordinator, DP and grip all at once. Somehow, it's working - I feel incredibly focused. Time to go shoot.

Ignition

This seems like a good omen; I found this ancient piece of pottery in an antique store. Apparently it came from the Phoenician city of Jbeil (which may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world). Yes, it's a pigeon.

It's hard to believe I'm finally back in Lebanon with enough funding to shoot a project I've been dreaming about for over two years. Props to Loaded Pictures for helping to make it all happen.

I've had a busy time here in Beirut so far. After a run-around day applying for the necessary permissions from the police and military, I went out for a few beers with Mitch, a terrific writer/photographer I met here in 2006, and Johan, who was passing through after 8 weeks in Iraq with the NY Times. I got the lowdown on sketchy security contractors, hashish runners and the Sunni-Alawite clashes in Tripoli. Earlier in the evening, a grenade attack on a cafe left 8 people wounded in Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite neighborhood. This was followed by a retaliatory attack in the nearby Sunni neighbourhood of Tabbaneh. Sectarian clashes in the area are a growing concern, especially since they seem to mirror incidents that sparked the civil war in 1975.

But that's not why I'm here. I'm looking for pigeons, and pigeon handlers, and specifically people who do this in the 12 official Palestinian camps that are scattered across the country. And while I'm assured that this phenomenon is very much alive and well, it seems more difficult than I thought to track these people down. This is exacerbated by the fact that my fixer was in a serious motorcycle accident last week. I spoke to him on the phone the other day and he sounded about as good as anyone can sound with a shattered arm - which means I need to opt for Plan B.

Forunately, in Lebanon there are only about 2 degrees of separation between people. On Thursday, I met with an awesome production coordinator here named Rana who passed on the name of a Palestinian cameraman who might be able to help, and a guy I worked with in 2007 thinks he can help me on Monday. Later that night I went to see Montreal's ECP DJ at Zico House on Spears street (thanks for the tip Patricia B.!), where I met a guy who runs film workshops for Palestinian kids. I left as the dance floor swelled to the beats of what could have been a Megasoid track and walked home, a lamb soujouk in hand and the promise of a busy weekend ahead.

Friday, I played the waiting game, working on leads, leaving messages and emailing key people in between snacking on some of the best hummous I've ever had, with fresh vegetables from the market. This led to a very long and very overdue jetlag nap, followed by a very short and very painful home haircut (note to self: $5 beard clippers purchased at an electronics store in Ashrafiyeh might not be the best tool). At midnight, I got antsy and went to a nearby bar run by a former photojournalist, where I met a very nice arms dealer who gave me an interesting ride back to my place, pulling high-tech weaponry out of the back seat of his convertible to show me while keeping the other hand on the wheel. I love this place.