A PALESTINIAN filmmaker is set to take his documentary about a boy born in an Israeli prison on tour around Scotland.
Akram Alashqar – who is currently studying for a PhD at Glasgow University – produced a film called First Picture back in 2006 which follows the life of two-year-old Palestinian child Nour after he is released from a West Bank prison without his mother.
The film is set in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the north of the West Bank where Nour is reunited with the rest of his family and formerly imprisoned friends of his mother, Menal.
It is now being shown across venues in Scotland with Alashqar hoping to shine a light on the innocence of Palestinian children as well as Palestinian prisoners that he feels the media does not focus on.
“I notice in the media about how Trump and others are talking about Israelis as hostages in Gaza, but they are not talking about Palestinian prisoners. Nobody knows about them. Journalists don’t focus on it somehow,” he said.
“There are a lot of things about Palestinian prisoners, especially women and children, who go to prison against every law in the world.”
It comes as last month the first case of a Palestinian child’s death in Israeli detention in history was recorded, according to the group Defense for Children International - Palestine.
Reports say Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad, 17, died inside the Megiddo Prison. At the time, the Israeli Prison Service said in a statement that "a 17-year-old security detainee from the West Bank died yesterday in Megiddo Prison", without identifying him, or giving any details about the circumstances of his death.
Alashqar chanced upon the story of Nour’s birth inside Israel’s Telmond prison in a newspaper.
He was shocked to find the story buried in the middle of the paper but kept hold of it and set out to find a way of delving into it further.
“I wrote some notes and after a while this film institute in Jordan was talking about supporting filmmakers to do films and Palestine was not part of it, it was for other Arab regions,” he said.
“I contacted them and convinced them to add Palestine, and they accepted I could apply. We don’t have good post in Palestine like you do in the UK, and I had to find a friend in Jordan who could print out the documents and send them. It was not easy for me.”
After overcoming challenges to get support for his film, Alashqar went to visit Nour’s family to tell them about his idea.
But while he was there, he came across journalists looking to film Nour after he was released from prison, and Alashqar spotted the “artificial” way they were going about filming their footage.
He was inspired to film something much more authentic and proceeded to spend a whole two months with Nour before he even introduced a camera to ensure he got to know him well.
Alashqar told The National it was important to him to approach filming in this careful manner, capturing the pure innocence of Nour, in a world where Palestinians are so often branded terrorists and their words twisted by the media.
“For me Nour represents every Palestinian who gets born in this situation. He doesn’t have any clue why he’s here, he just finds his destiny as a Palestinian in this land, and this land belongs to him and his family, so he wants to live here and work here and be as other people,” he said.
“I am trying to show the innocence of Nour and the innocence of most Palestinians who get badly represented as terrorists or other labels.
“It's a great way to show what Nour and his mother and family got into from the first day and the dilemma choosing whether to have Nour in prison with his mum or to have Nour with his father outside the prison as a free boy, but he will lose the company of his mother. It’s not like one choice was good and the other was bad.
“This is some of the deep thoughts I was trying to show in this.”
First Picture will be shown in Edinburgh at Augustine Church on Monday, April 23.
It will then move to ESOL Perth the following day before being shown at Quaker Hall in Aberdeen on Tuesday, April 29, and the courtroom at Forres Tolbooth on Wednesday, April 30.
The final showing will be in Ardrishaig Hall in Argyll and Bute on Tuesday, May 6.
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