Melbourne International Film Festival 2020: Interview with David Osit, Director of MAYOR

Akin to every punch-drunk potboiler in Shane Black‘s shambolic filmography, David Osit‘s eye-opening but essential documentary Mayor, begins at Christmas. Where Black uses the ornament-abundant, festive season as a decorative backdrop for tales of caustic cops and private eyes, Osit‘s introductory warm aesthetics gently shepherds an unsuspecting audience into Ramallah, the de facto capital of Palestine. Within this city emerges a wonderful character study of Musa Hadid, the diligent Mayor of this progressive city does not play out how one might expect from a contemporary portrait of the West Bank experience, one of the many highly satisfying surprises that lie within this stirring testament to the hard-working individual; whether you’re the filmmaker or the titular subject.

With a clear control of tone that navigates tricky tragicomedy and Kafka-esque realms of nightmarish bureaucracy, Osit‘s roving camera invites us into Hadid‘s paradoxical political and domestic realms, which escalate from parking ticket disputes to armed Israeli warfare at Ramallah’s oft-contested borders, as Mayor mines its central, conflicted character to uncover a major aspect of Palestine rarely reflected in the West. As one of the films programmed at Melbourne International Film Festival 68½, I had the chance to talk with the director of Mayor, David Osit about the inception of this documentary, juggling the Kafka-esque comedic tone, his approach to shooting the city of Ramallah, and how he approached the film’s subjects.

This is Alex Lines for Film Inquiry. How did Mayor begin as a project for you?

David Osit: I had spent a lot of time working in and out of The Middle East and I was pursuing a career in a completely different field before I did the film. As I became interested in film and was starting to edit, I was editing a documentary by a Palestinian director named Mohanad Yaqubi called Off Frame. I was editing the film in Ramallah and it had been a couple of years since I’ve been there and I was really taken by how much it seemed to me that the city had changed since the several years that I’d been there. All of a sudden there were hipster bars and nightclubs and free unlimited public Wi-Fi and a Jaguar dealership. I just remember thinking to myself, Oh, this is a very surprising and I had spent some time in The Middle East by this point, but growing up as an American, I still can’t shake the way in which The Middle East is presented to us through popular culture as a monolith, as a one-dimensional environment.

And Ramallah really surprised to me, even despite the fact I had this experience. So I was intrigued by that but didn’t really do anything about it. I came home and Mohanad eventually came to New York, which is where I live and we screened the film that he directed. While he was staying with me, I remember just asking him out of curiosity, what’s the mayor of Ramallah like, and his response was pretty simple: Oh, he’s Christian, he’s very charismatic, he’s very funny, he vapes all the time and I know his brother.

Immediately the wheels started turning in my head thinking about what his job is like, I wonder what his general workflow, in terms of his job and responsibilities to try to run a city without a country, is like. After that, I desperately wanted to meet him and I had a very sneaking but solid suspicion that there could be a really remarkable film somewhere inside of the municipality of Ramallah. Since I had a contact through his brother, I figured I would start with the mayor, start with the top but then when I met Musa, I just immediately could tell that he was the perfect conduit for telling this story.

Can you tell us about meeting Musa Hadid for the first time, and how your relationship developed throughout the shooting of the film?

David Osit: I remember pretty vividly first walking into his office, I didn’t have a camera and I was just there to meet with him and talk and tell him about the film idea. He was on a phone call at the time when I walked in and he was talking to one of his constituents and my Arabic at the time was still pretty rusty, but I could at least pick up most of the conversation. It was essentially something along the lines of like, Hey man, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t park there and you won’t get a parking ticket and you’ve got to stop calling me about this! I remember hearing that phone call and just thinking to myself, this is exactly what I’m interested in.

The quotidian elements of being a mayor adjacent to this massive geopolitical conflict that’s been misunderstood and ongoing for decades, one that is generally depicted through tragedy, through overt pain, and while those things are valid, the other things that are valid are people’s humanity and resilience, and I’ve never seen much of a depiction of that. I was really excited to think about what if I could make almost a comedic documentary, not laughing at anybody, but leaning into the humour and absurdity of the circumstances and having that be the point of relation for an audience.

When it comes to the film’s comedy or tragicomedy I should say, was that a tone that was planned from the beginning, or something that you found when shooting or in the editing process?

David Osit: To be completely honest, I kind of planned it – not planned, but anticipated that I’d be able to make a funny film or a film that engaged with humour. I would often be filming scenes thinking about, well, is there anything humorous here? Is there any elements of the bureaucracy that’s humorous? There’s this feeling I felt from very early on, one of the first scenes I filmed was when people in the film are having a conversation about how to do a flash mob for a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the centre of the city and the deep degree of care and planning that was going into this, as I felt at the time, a simple and silly thing was staggering and almost touching.

That’s what the humour in the film for me revolves around is giving you permission to laugh because you understand that this mayor is a man of incredible dignity and character and the circumstances around him are constantly attempting to strip him of that occupation and to have all of these challenges that he’s facing, whether it’s the occupation of the city or the ability to put on a Christmas festival lumped into one orbit shows the inequity of that challenge and shows the horror of it even more effectively in my opinion, than just focusing on the occupation itself. It’s a contrast thing, it’s in such stark contrast to anything else that any other mayor has to deal with, it’s kind of shocking.

What I noticed when watching your film is that your approach is quite gentle and natural towards your subjects and surroundings, it never felt like I was watching an outsider merely coming to Ramallah and just popping their camera down, from your perspective, how do you feel you achieve this level of naturalism and is this an important factor in your filmmaking?

David Osit: Thank you for saying that because I’d say it’s the most important factor for me. I desperately needed people to understand that I was there with them. I was there alongside them with a camera and I was imbued with some storytelling ability as a result, but I made sure that I would have a relationship with any single person who showed up in the film. That is especially true for Musa. I really saw Musa as a collaborator on the film with me, I would talk to him often. I really reject this principle of ‘Fly on the Wall’ filmmaking when it comes to these kinds of films because it implies that I’m just showing up and pretending I’m not there. I just think that’s disingenuous, of course, I’m there.

I have a camera, so there’s a power dynamic – I’m American, so why would I be in this room otherwise, except for the fact that I had a camera and I’ve been trusted. So if I’m being trusted, then I should earn that trust. I really feel as though I became friends with everyone I was filming and I would talk to them about what I was doing and tell them why I was making the film and why I was interested in what their work was. I would also just really get endeavour, just from a perspective of how to make sure I could film everything successfully and get the things I wanted, I made a tremendous effort to make sure I was always a positive presence.

I would not ever let the camera down, I would smile at everyone, I would be kind to people. I tried to make sure that people actually wanted me around which sounds pretty basic, but I do think that goes against some strange dogma, somewhere buried in the annals of documentary handbooks of filmmaking and I resent that because I’m interested in people and I don’t see how I could be rejecting the idea of being a person while I’m interested in people.

Can you talk about your approach to the film’s cinematography? It’s quite visually striking, and as I’m sure you’re aware, deserves the theatrical treatment.

David Osit: Thank you. I tried to set a couple of rules for myself when I first started filming and I really never thought I’d shoot the whole film, I think in some magical world, I imagined that I’d be able to raise money and hire like a great cinematographer and just do that. But I’ve always ended up shooting myself out of financial necessity and I enjoy it but with this film, I was thinking to myself from really early on with everything I’m filming here, I want it to feel different than the shaky camera, Handycam work that haunts cinema from this region, not cinema from this region, but cinema made by Westerners in this region.

I wanted the film to be more evocative than that horrendous feeling that accompanies films that take place in the global South, you’re just barely here and the director is more interested in getting the shot of violence than showing you a composition or showing you the place. I really wanted to do everything I possibly could to show a different kind of image. That’s what the whole film was about and that’s what drew me to Ramallah in the first place, the cinematography had to reflect that as well as the music.

That was another thing, I felt I had to reflect how unexpected the city is for the people when they first sit down and watch it. So it had to look different than the images you’ve seen of Palestine and also have to sound different too, I really put a lot of attention into the music choices for this.

Your introduction immediately draws you in, it gets you onboard right away.

David Osit: I find the introduction very funny because I find it discordant. When I try to take off my filmmaker hat and I watch the film as an audience member, whether in the editing room or at the festivals, I’m watching the opening and I’m chuckling to myself because it’s just so ornate and epic – then there’s a shot of a Popeye’s. I enjoy that discord, I think that’s where the humour begins in the movie.

I think you’re catching audiences off guard because I think they do see the logline for Mayor and they expect one film, they expect this serious documentary that focuses on the violence and the suffering, and then you’re immediately pulling the rug from under them.

David Osit: I’m glad you actually appraised it that way because that’s the way I often think about it. Genuinely in the editing process, I was thinking, how can I really shake up the foundation of where an audience is standing ideologically when they first come into this film because regardless of whether you’ve been to the region or not been to the region, or whether you know it well or don’t know it at all, whatever your feelings are about it are, there’s still a trend in the way media represents this part of the world. When I say media, I mean not just news media, but like everything, we’re at the point in the West where you hear the sound of a call to prayer and you know that it’s about conflict.

I was really thinking that in the first 10 minutes of this film, how can I just make an audience wonder to themselves “Where the hell am I?” because then you’re not following the geopolitics and the conflict, you’re following a person. You’re just following Musa, he’s your only tour guide. He’s the person that you’re going to follow and fall in love with a little bit and then try to understand what does this world looks like through the eyes of someone trying to make some change and effectuate change. I feel like those kinds of stories are a lot harder to come by when it comes to the geopolitics of conflicts, because it’s frankly a little less easy to do, to focus on the micro when there’s so much to understand than the macro.

Has Musa had a chance to see the film and what was his reaction to it?

David Osit: He watched the rough cut of the film about a month or two before I finished it. I showed it to him in Ramallah with his family and he really loved it. His family loved it too, and this is going to sound vain but I would have been shocked if he didn’t, because I truly saw him as such a partner in this. It wasn’t going to be possible for him to not like this film, it’s his view of Ramallah, it’s his world. I spent a lot of time with him thinking about what his experience is and this film is following this man who represents everything that we in the West talk about, this Neo-liberal idea of what Palestine could look like or should look like.

And he’s all these things: He’s cosmopolitan, he’s educated and he’s very obviously just a good man in this place and the West rejects Palestine anyway. I could feel his frustration, but in the two years I spent with him, I could feel his passion for his city and I tried to infuse the film with all of those things. It would have been a failure to me and to the film if he didn’t like it.

With the film currently on its festival run, is there any release plans at the moment?

David Osit: There’s some stuff that’s up in the air at the moment, but it’s a tricky time obviously to release a film and we’re gonna see how the rest of the year goes and there’s a couple of potential things that could happen, but we’re still taking it to festivals and having the film shared as widely as we can. I’m really excited about the reaction that I’ve gotten so far from people who have seen the film, either at digital festivals or in person.

It reminds me that the notion that people can engage with films about this region unless they already understand the region is not true because the most positive responses I’ve gotten from people has been from people who just have no idea about what this place is and what the conflict is about or anything about it and I think that’s because of the film is operating on that wavelength.

Film Inquiry thanks David Osit for taking the time to talk with us.

Mayor was programmed at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2020, and will be continuing to play at film festivals throughout this year. Details about upcoming screenings and ticket information can be found here.