Found

From SF to Jerusalem and back with Muayad Alayan and Christian Bruno

Muayad Alayan, a 24-year-old filmmaker from the only remaining Arab neighborhood in West Jerusalem, was not even aware there was such a think as Palestinian cinema until, as a teenager, he came to the Bay Area to visit his brother and sister. Later, after a stint at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, he returned to San Francisco as a film student at City College. Among his teachers was local filmmaker Christian Bruno, who this year traveled to Jerusalem as the director of photography for Alayan’s Lesh Sabreen? (Why Sabreen?, now taking donations).

"I liked him immediately," remembers Bruno of their first meeting at City College. "He was really attracted to cinema in a way that someone raised on Jean-Luc Godard could only be. He was the youngest person in the class, but he struck me more as somebody in their late 20s or 30s." The two kept in touch sporadically afterward, until one day Alayan called on Bruno to recommend a DP for a feature he planned to shoot in his hometown. Bruno immediately volunteered. "Mostly because I was interested in working with him," he says. Beyond the logistical nightmares both before and while shooting in Israel and the occupied West Bank (discussed by Alayan below), Bruno found the task of filming in Israel/Palestine at once eye opening and familiar.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, middle eastern film