Istiyad ashbah

The filmmaker brings together a team of men who, like himself, were jailed at the al-Moskobiya interrogation centre, Jerusalem. As they build their prison set and rehearse their roles of guards and detainees, tongues begin to loosen.

In 2009, in Fix ME, Raed Andoni, suffering from migraines, filmed his psychoanalysis and let the causes for his niggling headache rise to the surface: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Ghost Hunting, he imagines a dispositif to encourage Palestinians who, like himself and a quarter of the male population, have been held in an Israeli prison to talk more freely. Actors, plumbers, stonemasons: the volunteers who reply to his job advert come to prepare a film and, above all, build the set – the al-Moskobiya interrogation centre, re-created from their sketchy memories given that they were blindfolded during their time there. The construction gives Andoni and his small group a “medium” that avoids the solemnity of testimony. But it is the role play and, above all, the reversal of roles that produce genuinely cathartic moments, as when a former detainee is carried away by his violence when playing the interrogator. Little by little, the
filmmaker puts these Palestinian men face to face with the imperative of heroism that implicitly hobbles them. As the walls of the mock prison rise up, those of the past fall and the participants talk about their romantic life. Children and partners pop up even in this setting, which suddenly springs to life, and opportunely replace the exorcised ghosts. (Charlotte Garson)