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DUBAI: Nearly 10 years ago, Egyptian filmmaker Ali El-Arabi, the award-winning documentary behind Captains of Zaatari, which hit Netflix this month, made a promise . He was in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, the largest temporary settlement for Syrian displaced persons in the world, when a teenage boy he had just met named Fazi Kathrish asked him if he could speak to the camera out his truth.
“The first day I arrived, he asked me, ‘Ali, can you film me? I want to say something to people outside this camp. As soon as he opened my mouth, I said to myself, ‘This boy is mine’ Hero,'” El-Arabi told Arab News.
Catrish has dreams. He wants to be a professional football player. More importantly, he wants those outside the walls to know the truth about the refugee experience. He didn’t want pity, he told El-Arabi, he just wanted a chance.
With the film hitting Netflix in the Middle East this month, El-Arabi was overjoyed. Finally, after seven years of filming and years of touring around the world, his promise came true.
“Honestly, I lost a lot of money because I refused to sell the film to a smaller platform that might limit its reach. That was for Fawzi — because I gave him that promise on day one I told him to speak his mind, and I would tell everyone in the world his story. Since then, that has been my mission,” El-Arabi said.
El-Arabi knows what it’s like to receive the information people need to hear. He was an athlete himself, a dedicated and successful martial artist, and even won Egypt’s National Taekwondo Championship. During the Egyptian Revolution, however, Arabi abandoned any future he might have had in sports in favor of filmmaking.
“Captain Zaatari” is streaming on Netflix. (supply)
“I started to feel like I had something to say, but I couldn’t say it with my voice,” he said. “I realized that filmmaking was the way I could speak. I started making small documentaries about what was going on and showing them on the street. One day, the police came and I ran away with the film. That made me realize The power I can express with the camera.”
El-Arabi left Egypt to work with the ZDF TV channel to film documentaries in war zones such as Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan and Afghanistan. War coverage, however, is unsatisfactory because it often dehumanizes those caught up in terror.
“Refugees and victims of war are just numbers. This is news, and news just wants statistics,” El-Arabi said. “I can’t handle it like that. These people, I know more is going on than the news can tell.”
After meeting Qatleesh and his friend Mahmoud Dagher (who would eventually follow the two boys from a refugee camp in Jordan all the way to an elite football program in the Gulf), El-Arabi filmed them for seven years before reducing their story To as little as 75 minutes, the stories tell their incredible journey, while also refusing to gloss over the realities of refugee life.
Nonetheless, the film is full of promise, and El-Arabi’s proudest moment has come, not to show the film to the outside world as he originally intended, but to those who were in the same situation as he was when he first discovered Dagher and Qatleesh Similar people show the movie.
“We screened it in a refugee camp in Lebanon and one by one people came to me and told me that, for the first time, they could think about the future. They said the film showed them that they could not only have dreams, but achieve them A dream. I will never forget that,” El-Arabi said.
Since its limited release in 2021, the film has changed the lives of the two young men the story tells.
“They are stars now. They feel it. Even some football clubs have seen the film and want to give them a chance,” El-Arabi said. “The Jordanian government and the leaders of the camps respect them. The children in the camps look up to them as role models. I’ve been talking to them and it’s been wonderful to watch, although they also feel pressure from their families and they need to get started as soon as possible. Deliver on that promise and change their situation.”
Still from El-Arabi’s upcoming project “Ashish’s Journey”. (supply)
While he may have finished their story, El-Arabi has spent the past few years hard at work on another “Ashish’s Journey” for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. It was inspired by a man who approached him while filming “Captain Zaatari” in Qatar.
“One day an Indian came to me and asked if he could take a photo with me. He thought I was a footballer and he told me he wanted to send the photo back to his family,” El-Arabi explained. “He told me, ‘I’m here to watch the World Cup. But I don’t have the money to come, so I’m here to work now, hoping to meet the famous players one day. I thought you were one of them.'”
The longer El-Arabi spent with the man, the more intrigued he became with his innocent desires, which led him not only to film Ashish in Qatar, but to follow him and his family back to India, even adding fictional elements (Ashish plays himself) Inspired by the classic French satirical novella The Honest.
“He’s actually a very good actor,” El-Arabi said.
While El-Arabi knows he’ll finish filming at the World Cup later this year documenting Ashsh’s adventures during the game, he doesn’t plan to kick out the film immediately after the event.
“I want to taste the material. I don’t want to rush into a big festival. I love working on the film. I don’t want to kill the process — kill everything I put in it — just to get something done quickly,” he said. Say.
El-Arabi also has other projects underway. He is currently working on a film about Algeria and is in discussions with his best friend Mohamed Diab, the director of Marvel’s Moon Knight, about making the upcoming project. The closest thing to his heart, however, is a fictional film from his work in Los Angeles and Egypt, inspired by his own boxing history and his relationship with his father.
“We’re talking (about) it with major international stars,” he said. “This story draws a lot from my own personal experience with my family, almost every time I pitch it to someone they cry. One person I worked closely with said after I was done they had to leave the room to call their dad Telephone.”
While telling Arabic stories will remain a key part of El-Arabi’s career moving forward, it’s not the capture of his identity that drives him in the end—it’s the capture of his soul.
“I can tell Arab stories, but I don’t think too much about telling stories about the Arab world,” he said. “I think about humans. That’s all I’m interested in.”
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