Donna Baillie’s “microdocumentary” Waiting… offers us a glimpse into the daily struggles faced by some children as a result of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

1. What made you choose this story for your film? I am interested in showing the hidden realities of peoples’ lives, especially when faced with overwhelming situations that are usually only portrayed in terms of vast, impersonal forces, such as those of international conflict. Footage of children running a gauntlet of soldiers while trying to get to school provides a very graphic and human-sized glimpse of the realities of life under military occupation.
2. What’s the message you’d like your audience to take away from your film? I was only able to get the footage in the streets by using a hidden camera: otherwise I would have been stopped from filming and had my tapes confiscated. There are many aspects of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that are not generally seen by western audiences. If we want to understand what is going on in this region, we need to look past the official statements and listen to people on the ground. One clarification: it was the soldiers who would have stopped me from filming. On previous filming trips to the region, IDF soldiers had fired warning shots at me to make me stop filming, and on one occasion confiscated my camera. I managed to get the camera back eventually, but they kept the tape.
3. Why make this film now? Children’s education in Palestine continues to face obstacles due to the military occupation. The particulars change – when I was filming, soldiers were stopping the children in Hebron; today it is Israeli settlers who stop them on their way to school – but the negative impact on attendance and academic achievement is threatening the futures of an entire generation of children.

UPDATE: since this interview, we’ve received a link to UK newspaper The Independent and a further quote from Donna Baillie (April 21st 2008):

“One of the major newspapers in the UK has a front page story today on Israeli soldiers talking about the human rights abuses carried out by the army in Hebron”

Read the Independent article

“The testimonies of these soldiers, in which they detail abductions, beatings, theft, and torture carried out by themselves and their colleagues while stationed in Hebron, reinforces the argument of my film, and demonstrates the negative impact on the perpetrators as well as the victims of such polices and practices.”

Alan Westaway is director of The Good Cop, a short film about an absurd, slightly sinister situation in a police interrogation room which poses questions about the relationship between individuals and institutions.

The Good Cop

Dear Babelgum,
Below are the answers to your questions regarding Human Rights.

1. What made you choose this story for your film? I chose this story because I thought it was funny and poignant and beautifully absurd. I’m a huge fan of Magnus Mills, the author of the original short story, and love his sensibility in regards to the tyranny of daily work. He seemed to be saying in this short story that it is the people that work in institutions who are often more trapped than those of us that get caught up in their bureaucracy. It was only during the rehearsing of the film did it really start to dawn on us how relevant the story was at the time we were making it. Occasionally the actors would finish a scene and there would be a nasty silence in the room. The absurdity of the situation wasn’t funny anymore, it was ugly, particularly in the context of what was happening politically in our country and around the world. At this time, the British government were pushing through a bill to hold terror suspects for up to 90 days without charge and Guantanamo Bay was in the news daily. I think this affected the playing of the film and particularly the way that I shot the ending, which has a slightly darker, more sinister mood than the source material.
2. What’s the message you’d like your audience to take away from your film? I didn’t really make this film for an audience to take away a message as such, more a mood or feeling and to ask questions. The film is about two men lost in a bureaucratic nightmare that begins with a funny, absurd misunderstanding and ends in a potentially dangerous situation. I suppose it’s about the problems that can be caused by people becoming disconnected from what they’re doing day to day and although this happens in most jobs the most dangerous place for it to happen is in large governmental institutions like the police force or the army. Accountability becomes almost impossible to pin point. Are the individuals making their own decisions? Or are they following a set of rules or behaviours set down by the institution they’re working for?
3. Why make this film now? Like I said earlier, I made the film because I loved the story, its humour and the wider philosophical issues about individuals and their relationship to work and institutions. It was only during rehearsals that I started to feel that it was particularly relevant to Britain at the time; the paranoia, the fear of terrorist attack, the government’s seeming need to stir up this fear so that they could introduce draconian laws, allowing them to hold and interrogate innocent people for as long as they could get away with. Suddenly this beautifully absurd, funny but dark short story had a wider context, that in it’s own obscure way, it might shed a little light on.