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Filmmakers document one month in Zaatari in ‘Salam Neighbor’

By Sara Gharaibeh - Jul 14,2016 - Last updated at Jul 14,2016

Photo courtesy of Living on One and 1001 Media

AMMAN — Registering as refugees and setting up a tent, two American filmmakers headed off to Zaatari camp to stay for one month, in an attempt to give the world an intimate look at the lives of refugees in what has been called the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis. 

Coordinating with the Interior Ministry and the UNHCR, which is entrusted with the aid and safety of the camp, Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci were given an unprecedented permission to live in the camp as refugees, to film “Salam Neighbor”.

“Everyone was so welcoming, we felt right at home. On our first day we had 10 cups of tea,” Temple said through Skype after the film’s screening at the Royal Film Commission (RFC) on Wednesday.

The film goes a long way to change the image of terrorism and extremism that the West commonly associates with the Middle East. 

There was a lot of card playing, art making, survival stories, sharing meals and singing at the camp, and tea seemed to be always flowing in the tents and trailers of the world’s second largest refugee camp that has grown to become more of a city, with an independent and growing economy.

“The tent was set up in the middle, and from day one, Raoof would visit us every day. He was the one who taught us how to make Syrian tea,” said Ibrahim, the Jordanian translator who was accompanying the film crew, during the discussion that followed the screening.

Raoof, a 10-year-old who has been living in the camp for two years, wants to be a doctor, and the documentary shows him getting close to the filmmakers, as they became a source of entertainment for him and his friends.

They even start attempting to convince him to go back to school, which he has not done since leaving Syria. After resistance, they succeed and they took him to school, where he registers but was soon overwhelmed and wanted to go home.

They were told later that day by Raoof’s father that his school in Syria was bombed. 

Learning of this trauma and realising the little they understand of what their new friends are going through seem to overwhelm the filmmakers themselves. 

In the 75-minute film, the neighbours of Temple and Ingrasci in the camp, which is home to some 79,326 people, tell their stories and dangerous journeys across the border from a dignified middle-class life to poverty and depression. 

“People are much more powerful than numbers,” said Jordanian producer Salam Darwaza at the RFC during the discussion.

“In America if you just give numbers they will forget all of it; the important thing is the people, that when you see the film you say I know Raoof, I know Ismael,” Darawza continued, standing next to Raoof, Ismael, Um Ali and other Zaatari residents from the film’s family. 

“That’s why the film is called ‘Salam Neighbor’,” she added.

“We made this movie for Americans who don’t know about the refugees’ conditions and what Jordan is doing for them. We are trying to show a human aspect of the crisis that you don’t see on the news, and we’re trying to get more support for Jordan and the refugees,” Darwaza said.

The film has been on Netflix for three weeks now and is one of the top rated films, she added, noting that several schools and universities in the US are now showing it to students to give them a better understanding of the real refugee crisis and the support they need.

 

In one of the last scenes of the award-winning documentary, the filmmakers sit in a tent with their new Syrian friends as they drink tea together in their last days in the camp, and one Syrian asks: “There is a perception around the world that Arabs or Muslims are terrorists. Have we given you this impression?”

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