It’s five years now “more or less” since Goran Hugo Olsson embarked on his archive documentary project, Israel-Palestine On Swedish TV 1958-1989. Inevitably, last October’s Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on Palestine have given the film a new urgency but Olsson (whose previous credits include The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 and Concerning Violence) was hard at work long before the latest horrific explosion of violence in the region.
The idea for the project came after Olson was given access to the Swedish public TV archives and realised just how much material it contained detailing life and politics, love and war, in Palestine and Israel. “I discovered some great footage basically,” he comments.
As he pored over this material, the director asked himself a familiar question: is it worth it? If he was going to embark on an epic endeavour like this (the film is well over three hours long), he wanted to be sure there would be an audience. “You always search for the project where you think this makes cinematic sense.”
Olsson quickly decided Israel-Palestine passed the test.
Over the 30-year period covered, SVT reporters covered everything from the plight of children in refugee camps to the horrific massacres in Sabra and Shatila; from the Camp David accords to the murder of the athletes at the Munich Olympics. They spoke to everyone. David Ben-Gurion, Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat feature – and so too to soldiers, refugees, freedom fighters, mothers, young idealists and others.
Olsson grew up watching many of these films when they were originally broadcast.
He himself has a long-standing if not always smooth relationship with SVT. “I worked there as a very young person but for reasons that are hard for me to understand, I didn’t fit in,” he says. “It’s such a solid organisation. I really wanted to work in public service [TV] basically in any capacity. They said we can broadcast your films and we [can] support your films but you can never be an employee because you’re too much of a…something.”
The maverick Olsson is still not entirely sure what they meant. “I would go there tomorrow if they offered me an opening. But that is how it goes. You have to be very corporate to fit in.”
Ask Olsson if he is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel and he acknowledges it’s a “natural question.” He answers it by reflecting on his own background. He grew up in Lund in southern Sweden in a “well to do” neighbourhood. “At that time, it was totally normal for people to have a small paper money box to collect money for an ambulance in Israel and teenagers in the very same household had the Palestinian scarf. Since I can remember, it has been natural to me that Israel has the right to exist, the right to defend itself and all that. There’s no question about that. But other people also have rights and shouldn’t be exposed to structural violence and oppression.”
In other words, the director’s perspective is similar to that of the UN.
“I am the first one who understands that justice must come first and peace after that. But today I think people have forgotten that the goal with everything is peace. It’s not violence; it’s not revenge; it’s not power; it’s not land.”
It worries Olsson that in discussions of the conflict, peace is often off the agenda. The talk is about political goals, weapons and territory.
“Archive material doesn’t tell us what really happened. But says a lot about how it was told,” reads the inter title that opens the film. This was the director’s way of acknowledging to the audience the “subjectivity” that inevitably crept into the documentary even as the filmmakers “did our utmost to be objective.”
“It’s better to be humble and build the confidence with the audience – to tell them that we’re not stupid and it’s not like we think we know the truth,” the director adds.
Watching the film, audiences may feel a nostalgia for an era when public service broadcasting was in such a robust state. The SVT journalism from Palestine and Israel shown in the documentary deals with the issues at hand both seriously and thoroughly. It also has a depth which the US and British reports from the region couldn’t always match.
“Unique in Sweden was, of course, that it was a rich country but it was also neutral. This was the peak of the Cold War so Sweden had access to both sides in the same way that British or even Danish or Dutch media didn’t have because they were connected to NATO.”
The Swedish journalists were proudly independent but also very down to earth. Sometimes they may have sounded naive but that was part of their appeal. Swedish audiences were finding out with them what was going on. They asked the obvious questions: “hello…what are you fighting for?”
Olsson has made other archive-based films. What was different about Israel-Palestine was the huge amount of material he had to sift through. He also believes that audience behaviour has changed since he started out in the business.
“Most people watching my films, maybe even in theatres, they are on Wikipedia at the same time – so you don’t have to say when Yasser Arafat died or when Israel was formed. People look that up at the same time.”
The director hopes Israel-Palestine will be embraced by students and that it will become a “campus film.”
“I don’t mind if young people get together, watch it and check things on the phone at the same time. That’s OK for me…”
Ask the director the biggest challenge he faced in making the film and he suggests it was a psychological one: “to watch this [material] for four plus years and then, on a Saturday, to wake up to something that what was one hundred times worse…I am still in nightmare, I am still depressed.”
Olsson hasn’t been back on social media since October 2023. “I’ve been in war…it is indescribable suffering. With war comes rape. With war comes killing children and people destroying themselves from within…it’s unbelievable. I’m totally in despair.”
The documentary has an extra poignancy because it shows all the opportunities for peace that were squandered over the years. There were idealists in both Israel and Palestine trying hard to come up with models for the co-existence of the two states. “It’s a takeaway that so many people had these ideas and we could have been in a totally different situation…All the people who are most aggressive, most violent – they have prevailed.”
The film, made as a Story Production in collaboration with SVT, Tekele and Ström Pictures, is sold by Reservoir Docs. Swedish distribution through Folkets Bio is set for early October.
