The late Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said dedicated much of his life to preventing the erasure of Palestinian identity after the 1948 foundation of Israel. His struggle to advocate for his people’s cause in the West, and his bold proposal for Palestinian Israeli coexistence is told in the new documentary Edward Said: Between Worlds. The nonfiction feature just held its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
“[Said] taught comparative literature at Columbia [University], but he was really also a Palestinian, had the Palestinian experience of his family being evicted from Palestine in 1948 when the creation of Israel happened,” noted director Maiken Baird as she stopped by Deadline’s TIFF Studio. “He was a sort of a Renaissance man. He was a concert pianist… He was an expert on Middle East politics and history. So, he really had a lot of different, interesting facets to him.”
Said spent his early years in Mandatory Palestine (then controlled by the British Empire), and in 1948 went to Egypt with his family, and later attended boarding school in the U.S.
Edward Said
Courtesy of TIFF
“The worlds that Edward was straddling was being an exile in the West, but being from the East,” observed producer Sarah Mowaswes. “For him, it was this constant turmoil that he faced of feeling like he was never belonging anywhere. So, ‘Between Worlds’ for us in this film was really bringing a Palestinian perspective and narrative to a Western audience.”
Edward Said’s daughter, Najla Said, serves as a consulting producer on the documentary. She described the thrust of her father’s work as a public intellectual.
“My father very much, very strongly felt that Palestinians should tell their stories and that… people should constantly be reminded of the narrative because we have all grown up in a world where there’s this story of the creation of Israel, which we read just in terms of what happened to the Jewish people. And we never think about what happened to the Palestinians who were on the land before that,” Najla Said commented. “He wrote a very famous piece called ‘Permission to Narrate’ and talking about our –Palestinians — need to tell their own story… Unfortunately, we have to constantly prove that we are real and that we exist.”
Edward Said served as an independent member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977-1991. For a time, he supported a two-state solution, but towards the end of his life, he espoused what might be considered a more radical proposal – Palestinians and Israelis living in a single nation governed not by religion but as a democratic, secular society.
“At a certain point, he just thought, ‘Why is it so outlandish and outrageous to assume that people could live together in a democratic state and have equal rights?’” Najla Said noted. “Because at the end of the day, the Palestinian story is simply that they don’t have the same rights as the other people on the land, as non-Jews. So, he came up with this, and he certainly wasn’t the first. I mean, Einstein talked about this years ago, having a binational state, and that’s sort of where he ended his life. And the irony is it is such a simple and common-sense answer to the problem, and yet to people it is so utopian and so outrageous and so inappropriate to suggest that people could live together and have the same rights.”
Panelists: Maiken Baird (director); Sarah Mowaswes (producer); Najla Said (consulting producer and daughter of Edward Said)
First screening: Saturday, September 12, Scotiabank Theatre
Sales agents: Dogwoof (international); Cinetic Media (U.S.)
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
The Deadline Studio at TIFF is hosted at Bisha Hotel and presented by Volvo, Columbia, Patrón and Schwarzkopf.
