Uniting for a common goal
Sidelining decades of conflict, a team of Israeli and Palestinian sportsmen united together through Aussie Rules football in a unique peace initiative. LEXI LANDSMAN spoke to the documentary maker who followed their inspirational story. 
 
ISRAELIS, Palestinians and Aussie Rules football. You’re not alone if you can’t imagine the three entities in the same sentence, never mind in the same place.¬†
The documentary Tackling Peace, written and produced by Marc Radomsky, is set to shatter misconceptions that individuals from opposite ends of the ideological and political spectrum cannot come together in a single team and play for a common cause. 
“If you looked at it from the outset, you’d think it was a crazy idea,” explains Radomsky from the Blue Mountains, during a break from filming a new SBS series.¬†But Radomsky met the challenge and documented the extraordinary result of Sydney-based footy mum Tanya Oziel’s endeavour to create the Peres Peace Team, which came together to compete against 16 countries in the AFL International Cup in Victoria last August.
The documentary had its premiere in Jerusalem on June 21 at the Australian Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE) Australian Film Festival. It will be screened in Australia on Network Ten on July 4.¬†”It’s not a football film per se, but the game provided a unique and different mechanism to get into the Israeli-Palestinian landscape and see how an intrinsically Australian sport and Australian values can possibly have some kind of impact and influence,” Radomsky says.
The immense, and some would say audacious, scope of the project is captured with the rare insight of the documentary’s lens as it follows the team from inception to competition, to the aftermath.¬†Narrated by actor Hugo Weaving, it opens a window into a lesser-told story of the Middle East. It depicts the struggle for peace against the players’ personal indoctrination and boundaries, with its roots on our own soil.
From a birds-eye view, the project’s impact may appear small. But from the ground, its immense symbolic resonance touched all who came across the team during mid-2008.¬†Their journey is captured in the 55-minute documentary, which follows the team’s struggle to overcome the cultural, social and steeply political undertones of the project.¬†The mammoth undertaking took over Radomsky’s life, but the personal costs were outweighed by his passion to make the documentary.¬†
“I think every film, every time you spend time with people, with the intensity of making a film, it has an impact on you,” he laments.¬†”It’s part of what I love about the work. It’s a dance — you come in with your own preconceptions and they can be changed … That’s what I tried to get across in this film: I wanted people to be able to watch it and see the complexities.”
The old adage that sport can transcend boundaries has perhaps never been tested so intensively or been more transparent than with the Peres Peace Team.¬†Twenty-six players were selected for the team -— 13 Israelis and 13 Palestinians from the ages of 16 to 36.¬†The team consists of Israeli coach Simon Jacobs, an army reservist, who came with the attitude that “in my eyes, defend your country first and then see how you can make friends with the enemy”.¬†On the Palestinian side, there are coaches such as Naser Gous, who was a former Palestinian fighter. He spent three years in an Israeli prison after an attack on Israeli soldiers. He believes peace is possible, but worries about being seen as a betrayer.¬†
There is 18-year-old Israeli Yonatan Belik, who had never met a Palestinian before he began training with the side. He formed a close bond with 16-year-old Leith Jaber, who comes from a Palestinian family. Overcoming those boundaries and bridging 60 years of conflict with Aussie Rules football was a challenge Oziel, who is the Australian director of the Peres Centre for Peace, says she felt driven to take on.
“This was about more than a peace team, it was about the next generation. About taking our great sport to the region and bringing two sides together through footy,” she says.¬†”When people said to me: ‘How can you introduce a new sport to a team who has never played it before and get them ready in six months?’ I said ‘You know what, watch me’.”
Oziel and the team proved the critics wrong. Despite only 20 training sessions and no match practice before arriving in Australia, the team won the Developing Nations division of the tournament.¬†For Oziel, the project was a major challenge, but it also solidified her belief that nothing was insurmountable.¬†”It was hard work and it was relentless, but it wasn’t impossible. In the end it was so phenomenal that I felt it had a divine energy because everything just fitted into place beautifully.”¬†Radomsky agrees that playing sport is a unifier.¬†
“It’s a teamwork thing. It gives people a goal there’s energy being channelled into something positive.” ¬†But the project had its difficulties. Radomsky was detained by Israeli armed forces and made to erase footage shot during a crossing at a checkpoint between Israel and Palestine.
He battled to strike a balance between being a fly-on-the-wall observer and part of the storytelling.¬†It meant having to tell the darker side of the project — when things went wrong, when battles broke out, when dreams faded and initiatives failed.¬†”When I make intimate films I often choose to operate the camera myself because it enables a less intimidating environment, and this documentary reflects that because it’s about trust and relationships and getting beyond the camera to something real,” he explains.¬†
Those real moments sometimes meant filming when he was told not to. He explains how the Peres Centre envisioned a picture-perfect story, but for Radomsky that wasn’t the case.¬†”When you follow a film for a year, you get to see how the conflicts develop, and then you can show the resolution and, by having the entire process, that’s how you achieve transformation and credibility … There were some battles and instances where I had to film secretly.”
Being a successful documentary maker and storyteller often comes down to building trust with the subjects and gaining their confidence. That skill was fostered with his roots in South Africa, where Radomsky was born and lived until he moved to Australia in 2000.¬†Growing up during the apartheid years, Radomsky gravitated towards the stories the media was shunting. He went to the townships and joined anti-apartheid movements, all the while documenting stories of the people he met — those who didn’t have a voice but had plenty to say.¬†”It was a way to be involved and contribute to the situation in South Africa. As a storyteller and filmmaker, I was telling stories that weren’t being told.”
It wasn’t long before he had defined his style of producing character-driven sociopolitical and sociocultural documentaries.¬†He co-founded and was the director of Free Film Makers/Gasworks post-production, associate producers of the Oscar-nominated biography of Nelson Mandela.¬†In his 15-year career, he has accrued an impressive portfolio and developed some 150 programs for local and international broadcasters and the development sector.
Like most filmmakers, Radomsky often thinks in images. Describing our culture today, he visualises a series of boxes lined up side-by-side, with himself sitting outside them all. All of the boxes are neat and labelled.¬†”We like putting labels on stuff cause then we can manage them: asylum seekers, people of Middle-Eastern origin, terrorists, whistle-blowers — all that shit just actually deflects from fact that we are talking about people.¬†”These labels generalise and therefore dehumanise, and through that dehumanisation, the door is opened to all kinds of abuse because then it’s easy to have preconceptions and it’s easy to judge.” ¬†
Radomsky says his goal all along has been to attempt to break those barriers and get to the individuals within the groups.¬†”Humanity is flawed and people make mistakes. There is no right or wrong, it’s just different perspectives and how we can come together and that’s what this film is about.¬†”That’s what I want people to understand -— to get beyond the basic, broad stereotypes into the complexity and realise ultimately we are talking about people who are struggling with very difficult and real issues, many of which they are not in control of. But they are trying to rise above that.”¬†Tackling Peace had its world premiere at the AICE Australian Film Festival in Jerusalem on June 21. It will be screened on Network Ten on Saturday July 4 in Sydney at 1pm and in Melbourne at 2pm.
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