Around the block
Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad takes to the road – twice.

By Johnny Ray Huston

'EEN FILM VON Hany Abu-Assad." Spelled out in a striking white font, the Dutch flourish in the director's credit of Ford Transit is an example of this Palestinian moviemaker's bold border crossing. Ford Transit itself follows a resourceful driver named Rajai Kitai as he uses the title vehicle to transport passengers and packages to and from Israeli-controlled checkpoints, and just as Rajai smuggles bootleg CDs for extra money, Abu-Assad raids a variety of musical sources to score his film. The tense, plodding piano of "Big Egos" from Dr. Dre's Chronic 2001 ricochets off one sequence: Dre shouts out to "Rovers, jeeps, and Regals" and "Benzes, jeeps, and Geos," while Rajai carries a wheelchair-bound man out of the hand-me-down Ford van, pushing him toward a rubble-strewn roadblock. The oppressive imagery – military checkpoints aren't exactly built for disability access – would verge on absurd if it didn't capture real terrain.

Once upon a time in the spaghetti western desert, Ennio Morricone's twangy, blaring arrangements heralded Clint Eastwood or Henry Fonda, but in Ford Transit they signal the arrival of Rajai's trusty van, distinguishable from dozens of nearby look-alikes only by a Nike-like swoosh above its front window. In one hair-raising sequence, a famously shrill Morricone cavalry call is paired with tattered and faded posters of suicide bombers, including one memorializing the first female "martyr." A few moments earlier, the girl's mother, riding in Rajai's van, has tearfully asserted that only God knows if her daughter is in heaven. A little boy peeks out from the seat behind her.

"We're not filming the roadblock; we're making a documentary about the Fords," Abu-Assad tells a border guard early in the film. The answer he receives, "I don't believe you," is more resonant than the soldier who voices it knows. Ostensibly making a doc about the Super Shuttle-like Ford Transits – U.S. automobiles that initially functioned as Israeli police and military vehicles – Abu-Assad can't help but film the roadblocks and thus depict their myriad negative effects. Moreover, much as Rajai bends the system ("Forgery is an art," he declares, adding that his illegal music stash is "better than real"), Abu-Assad flouts genre rules. Visually defined by brash juxtapositions and keen repetitions, narratively riddled with appearances by politicians, sociologists, and filmmakers who conveniently just happen to ride in Rajai's van, Ford Transit is clearly a docudrama. In fact, its success in documentary film competitions has sparked controversy.

Winner of the Spirit of Freedom Award for best documentary at the 2003 Jerusalem Film Festival, Ford Transit is defiantly free-spirited and has been punished accordingly; it was booted from a documentary festival in the Netherlands last fall when a BBC report exposed that at least one scene was scripted. It makes a twisted kind of sense that the BBC incited Abu-Assad's punishment, as that institution largely upholds buttoned-down doc definitions from the John Grierson era. (Grierson may have coined the term documentary, but French vérité specialists such as Jean Painleve and Georges Franju widened the form's representative scope.) I first saw Ford Transit last October at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where the BBC doc Al-Jazeera Exclusive was also programmed. Al-Jazeera Exclusive was compromised by its self-imposed censorship; in digitally scrambling the al-Jazeera network's images of violent war, the BBC refused to fully confront the documentary's subject. Abu-Assad's urge to magnify or embellish what he can't help but witness couldn't be more different.

Doc or not, Ford Transit isn't the first time Abu-Assad has taken to the roads of Ramallah and Jerusalem. His first feature, Rana's Wedding (2000), charts the journey of a young woman from a wealthy family who races to both meet and recast a marital deadline imposed by her father. In foregrounding the travels of people across embattled land, both films respond to the directions of Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, whose Ten shares Ford Transit's penchant for taxicab confessionalism. (Kiarostami's screenplay for Jafar Panahi's upcoming Crimson Gold also motors incessantly, through Tehran.) But Rana's Wedding politely obeys art-film tradition. While some reviews have facetiously punned off My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Run Lola Run, Abu-Assad's mood-shifting female portrait has deeper neorealist and old-new wave roots, harking back to Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 (in this case, Rana from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and Fellini's Cabirian nights. As Rana, Clara Khoury is called upon to emote through her eyes, Giulietta Masina-style.

Abu-Assad's two movies to date span class and gender lines, from Rana's wealthy, introverted femininity to Rajai's hustling, demonstrative masculinity. A Ford Transit figures briefly in Rana's Wedding (the credo No Fear is painted in the same spot where Rajai's sports the Nike slash). Rana leaps out of it into a violent confrontation between Israeli soldiers and rock-throwing Palestinian boys, before escaping to meet her husband-to-be Khalil on the stage of the theater where he works as a director – not to worry, he assures her, that other girl acting possessive toward him is just "an actress." Rana and Khalil's disputes brush up against a military presence that, in the film's eeriest moments, is purely, ruthlessly mechanical. In one scene, a surveillance camera impertinently cocks its "head" to stare at Rana and Khalil; later, when Rana leaves her bag by a bench, she returns to find it being obliterated by a robotic bomb-defusing device.

The mute indignation of these scenes runs counter to the mouthy boisterousness of Ford Transit, which is edited discursively and dramatically rather than chronologically. President George W. Bush gets sliced and diced in the movie's first round of jump-cut commentary. "Seeing him [Bush] gives me a heart attack," the largest passenger in Rajai's van opines. "There should be a warning to heart patients before he appears [on television]." A skinnier young man combs his hair after speaking his mind: "I have a suggestion for America. Give the next candidate for American president an IQ test – a low IQ is the worst form of terrorism."

Each time Ford Transit turns its attention to the back of Rajai's van, the discussions grow more complex, until ultimately, Patrick Minks's editing creates spirited arguments between individuals who aren't sharing the same ride. One sequence generates a back-and-forth between Palestinian filmmaker Suha Arran and Israeli filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg; Arran seems to anticipate and answer Goldberg's litanies, though both are in fact talking with the filmmaker. Throughout, the cinematography attentively moves beyond the slackness of typical talking-head presentations; when a blond Canadian exchange student insists she's helping the Palestinian "cause," the camera notices that one fellow passenger has become fixated on brushing something off of his shoes. "I'll be back," Rajai says, after stepping out of the driver's seat. His words may echo the catchphrase of a certain actor turned politician, but he's far more charismatic – not to mention intelligent.

'Ford Transit' plays Fri/27, 8:45 p.m., Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-1412. 'Rana's Wedding' plays March 12, 8:30 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 700 Howard, S.F. Call for price. (415) 978-2787. Both films are part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which runs through March 26. Go to hrw.org/iff/2004/sanfran/schedule.html for more information.