Chance encounter in Galway led to Golan Heights film

Date Published: 29-Jun-2012

 A FILM documentary about the Golan Heights featuring the stories of some of the people living there is being shown during this year’s Galway Film Fleadh.

Apples of the Golan took four years to make and has its roots in Galway following a chance encounter between Gearóid O Cuinn and one of the directors Keith Walsh in the Galway Film Centre during the summer of 2006.

Gearóid had visited the Golan Heights conducting human rights research and when he told Jill Beardsworth and Keith the stories from the region it was an unmissable opportunity from a filmmaking perspective. Here was a little known place from a well known conflict, a chance to tell forgotten stories.

The occupation of the Golan Heights has not featured in the news headlines for much of the 45 years of its occupation. The occupation of Gaza and West Bank and the imagery of the Palestinian resistance to a violent occupation was easily communicable

in the sound bytes and one minute news stories which make up our news bulletins.

In the Golan Heights the occupation and its resistance were less apparent, clandestine. It was this that appealed to the filmmakers, Jill and Keith.

Apples of the Golan is the epic story of a village turned prison full of rappers, rockers and regimes, salsa dancers, holy men and dead fish, traitors, lovers, freedom fighters and their heartbroken mothers set against the backdrop of the revolution raging in their homeland Syria as it creeps through the orchards towards their homes in Israel.

In 1967 Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria. Before the occupation, this Arab village was one of 139. Only five remain. 130,000 Syrian Arabs were permanently forced from their homes. This film tells the story of the people of one of these villages, Majdal Shams.

They are too few to fight. The apples are the bombs with which they fight the occupation. Their trees root them to the land; they will not be moved. Israel is their home, Syria their homeland. Neither is paradise. The film has already received good reviews describing it as absorbing, heartbreaking and well structured as a documentary.