Children from Jenin rehearse af the Freedom Theatre Kids watch a play

Stage set for freedom

A filmmaker’s return to Palestine resulted in a film about a youth theatre project. Sunita Rappai talks to Jewish comedian Ivor Dembina about Freedom Theatre

JEWISH stand-up comic Ivor Dembina is a man on an unusual mission. The Hampstead Comedy Club performer is trying to raise money for a remarkable theatre project helping Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank.
Dembina first came across the project, called the Freedom Theatre, when he was invited to a special screening of an Israeli documentary, Arna’ s Children, at the House of Commons.
The film tells the story of a group of children from Jenin, in Palestine who attended a theatre camp set up by a Jewish woman, Arna Mer Khamis. Arna died of cancer in 1995 and her beloved theatre was destroyed in the Israeli attack on Jenin in 2002.
Arna’s son, Israeli actor and filmmaker, Juliano Mer Khamis, had worked alongside his mother on the project and filmed the children play-acting during rehearsals. Three years ago he decided to go back to find out what had happened to them.
It makes for harrowing viewing. Shot over a period of some 13 years, the film intercuts footage of the children in their acting workshops – young, fresh, enthusiastic – with scenes of them as increasingly jaded teenagers and later as young gun-toting adults battling the Israeli occupation.
By the end, few have survived. Fresh-faced Yussef is shot dead by police on a suicide mission to the Israeli city of Hadera. He had driven there in a stolen Mitsubishi jeep and opened fire on a group of people standing at a bus stop.
Yussef’s friend Ashraf blows himself up in a suicide attack. Ala, whose house was destroyed in an Israeli attack ten years earlier, leads a resistance group. He is shot dead by Israeli soldiers. His first child, a boy, had been born two weeks earlier.
Mer Khamis’s film is remarkable for many reasons. As a documentary about his mother alone, it would have been astounding. Arna, tiny, wizened and utterly fierce, is a force of nature – a daughter of Zionist settlers who married a Palestinian and devoted her life to helping the children of Jenin.
But it is his access to these children of the Palestinian uprising or Intifada that is truly compelling. There is a scene where he asks friends of Yussef why he did what he did. “He loved freedom,” one says. “In the last two years, he felt imprisoned. He could not take it anymore. He felt like he was going to explode. He felt dead. His brother was killed at home. He said: “I’m dead anyway. So if I have to die, I’ll choose the way.”
For Dembina, who had visited Jenin on a peace trip three years ago, Juliano’s film struck a chord for many reasons. “I ended up seeing it twice,” he says. “I had seen first hand the demolitions and the effects of the bombardments on civilians there so I could connect with in a very tangible sense.”
Earlier this year, Juliano, who Dembina met at the House of Commons screeing, re-opened the Freedom Theatre on a temporary site in Jenin. According to Juliano, there is still a desperate need for the theatre. Out of 4,500 children in the camp, 1,800 have been diagnosed with post-traumatic syndrome including speech problems, violence and a lack of consideration for others.
“At the moment we don’t have anything,” he said, “but we have a lot of good intentions and a lot of people mobilized and there is an enormous reaction around the world.
“It is interactive. It’s theatre. It’s art. It breaks down barriers between people. And it is a children’s project. If this kind of project does not succeed, what will.”
Dembina, who is planning to get together a group of comedians for a special benefit concert later in the year, agrees. He is one of a number of high-profile supporters of the project. Others include actress Janet Suzman, comic Alexei Sayle and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman.
He says: “I was a teacher in my earlier life so I still have a deep interest in education of any kind. Arna devoted her life to the well being of people irrespective of their ethnic origins, in this place with a very oppressed section of Palestinian society.
“I am one of a growing number of Jewish people who are deeply uncomfortable and angry with the effects of the occupation that I witnessed in Jenin. I hope the Freedom Theatre can be a vehicle for peace.”

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