In 2005, British artist and filmmaker Sarah Beddington was invited to an arts conference in Beirut organised by Lebanese non-profit organisation Ashkal Alwan. She had never visited the region before and wanted to spend some time on her own there. On her last day, she broke away from the main group and found a cafe beside the sea.
“I just sat there on my own for a while. It was then that this woman sitting at the next door table asked if she could talk to me,” Beddington remembers.
The woman was Fadia, a Palestinian refugee living in a camp in Lebanon. “She asked me if I was happy. That was the beginning of our strange conversation.”
Beddington spent the rest of the day with Fadia. After she flew back to London, she stayed in touch. She was soon invited back to Lebanon to meet Fadia’s family.
Now, many years later, Beddington has made a debut feature documentary with her friend at its heart. Fadia’s Tree, which premiered last month at the London Palestine Film Festival at Curzon Soho, is the story of an ancient mulberry. The assignment which Fadia set Beddington was to travel to Palestine to find this tree. It stands on land which once belonged to Fadia and her family. Now, they’re living not so far away, but they’re in exile. Beddington, with her British passport, can cross borders which are closed to them.
“Somewhat daunted obviously!” Beddington describes her reaction to the challenge which Fadia had set her. “Basically, Fadia had put her trust in me to go to a place which she cannot go to and to find something which is so important to her and her family. If it still exists, it [the tree] represents the one member of the family which stayed behind.”
The filmmaker set off on her quest feeling considerable doubt. She had applied for an artist’s residency in Ramallah on the West Bank but had asked if she could be based in Jerusalem better to understand the complexities of the refugee situation.
Fadia and her relatives are shown in the film (which recently won Best Feature Documentary at the Karama Human Rights Film Festival in Amman, Jordan) reminding Beddington about the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, and which many Palestinians still view as the root cause of their misfortune.
“If I am introduced to someone in this Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, especially [from] the older generation, they all kind of shake their fist and say ‘oh, Balfour! That is why we are here.’” They talk about the Declaration as if it was made only yesterday, not more than 100 years ago. “History is not the past. Time is not linear in a place like this. It is very much held suspended,” Beddington notes of how the refugees seek redress for a historical wrong from so long ago.
The filmmaker’s mythic journey in search of Fadia’s tree did not begin in auspicious circumstances. She couldn’t find it. The area had been heavily built over. There were fences, houses and roads which made it very hard to track down. When she first arrived, all she saw were passers-by carrying an ancient model of a dragon which was riddled with wood rot.
“This journey Fadia sent me on became a kind of mythological journey, almost,” the director observes.
However, Beddington kept on looking. It helped that she could draw on the very precise memory of one of Fadia’s elderly, now blind relatives who could remember exactly where the mulberry was located.
Beddington fully understands the symbolic significance of the tree to Fadia and her family. “I grew up in a very rural location in the south-west of England, in a very small village. I was the only child. I would go and play in the woods and the fields. There would be particular trees that I would think of as my friends and that I would talk to, because there really weren’t many children of my own age in our hamlet. For me, it is totally normal to think of a tree as a relative.”
Fadia’s tree has an extra relevance. It is growing on the site of what was a shrine for over 1000 years to a granddaughter of the Prophet. This woman was believed to have passed through Palestine on her way from Medina to Egypt. She was known as an educator.
In Lebanon, Fadia now has a similar role. “She is someone in the camp who people come to when they have problems.” She is one of the moving forces behind the camp’s kindergarten. Here, Palestinian kids are taught alongside children from war-torn Syria or from Iraqi Kurdistan.
“I think Fadia has the ability to envision a Utopian world where there is not inequality, there is not difference. Everybody can be held together in the same safe, loving environment, Everyone [in the kindergarten] is treated the same. Everyone is given a lot of love. They all start to be able to communicate with each other which, when they first arrived, they [could not] because many are traumatised.”
Fadia’s Tree was produced by Susan Simnett of Over The Fence Films. Beddington met Simnett through Mia Bays, the producer behind the Birds Eye View Film Festival – and who has recently started as director of the BFI Film Fund.
Bays had encouraged Beddington to enrol in the Birds Eye View training and networking Filmonomics Course. Through the course, Beddington first encountered Simnett and told her all about the Fadia project. “She [Simnett] was only really considering working with fiction film but when she heard this story, she was so moved that, wonderfully for me and Fadia, she decided to take it. She has been invincible and indefatigable in championing it, and finding funding to finish it, ever since.”
The film has screened already at the Cinema Days Festival on the West Bank. However, Fadia and her family were not allowed to travel to the event. Nor was Fadia given a UK visa to enable her to attend the screening at the London Palestinian Festival.
Now, the aim is to find a sales agent for a documentary which, even in Fadia’s absence, has been receiving standing ovations wherever it has been shown so far.
“I was just very humbled by how many people it seemed to touch and by how many people who seemed to feel that Fadia’s story was their story,” the director says.
