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.