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.