In Rahat, an Israeli Jew and a Bedouin mom of 7 have founded a local film festival

It was the second night of the Rahat Film Festival and a small crowd was arriving for a screening of “Eid,” the award-winning Bedouin film about a construction worker from Rahat, Israel’s most populous Bedouin city.

The audience was not large, and it never is, said Danny Alter, founder of the festival.

Rahat is home to 300,000 residents. But there is no natural audience for a film festival there, said Alter.

“Bringing art and culture into a Bedouin community isn’t so simple,” he said.

The third annual festival ran from February 16-19 and screened about a dozen Mediterranean Basin and Middle Eastern films at the Rahat Cultural Palace, as well as animated films for local kids.

The front of the theater was half-full for “Eid,” with an audience of mostly Bedouin men and women and a few Jewish Israeli viewers.

Shadi Mar’i won the Ophir Award for Best Actor for his sensitive, carefully calibrated portrayal of the film’s title character, a young man grappling with sexual trauma in his past that feeds into his present and his desire for a new life.

It is a film that reveals the strict traditions of Bedouin society in Israel, as well as how those constrictions are slowly being reduced.

The smattering of teenagers present left halfway through, as the film — about a young Bedouin man abruptly married off by his parents — dipped into more emotional and sexually charged topics.

The film concluded with a panel moderated by Alter, including filmmaker Yousef Abu Madegem, actor Hisham Suliman, who plays Eid’s strict father, and screenwriter Yuval Aharoni.

They discussed the 10 years it took for Abu Madegem to make the film, the complexities of having Aharoni, a Hebrew-speaker, writing an Arabic film and Suliman’s immediate interest in the film when he caught a glimpse of the script.

Bedouin filmmaker Abu Madegem won eight Ophir nominations for “Eid,” and was the first Bedouin filmmaker to be nominated for the prestigious award. He also won the top film prize for “Eid” at the Jerusalem Film Festival competition in July.

Alter praised the film and his panel participants, but when the panel opened up to questions, the audience had more technical queries about the making of the film and its subjects.

Alter loves any kind of question — particularly when it is coming from his Rahat audience.

No newcomer to introducing arts and culture to overlooked areas, Alter has worked in Jerusalem and Yesod HaMaala, Herzliya, and Modi’in, as well as the Eshkol region, around the Gaza envelope communities. He came to Rahat when its giant cultural center was being built, offering his skills in community arts and culture.

“My thought was that I couldn’t stand that Israeli Jews came to Rahat just to eat and for the market. Is Rahat only about labane?” he said, referring to the soft Middle Eastern white cheese often sprinkled with olive oil and scooped up with pita.

Some of what Alter has preached seems to be working. His right-hand partner at the cultural center is Aliza Abdelkader, 51, a Bedouin mother of seven who is now studying film production, her second degree, at nearby Sapir College in Sderot.

Alter and Abdelkader created the film festival together, naming it Rahat Cinematheque, like the arthouse theaters in many Israeli cities, and bringing a selection of films they felt would appeal to the potential audiences.

During that first year, they held the film festival over four weekends in February, coinciding with Darom Adom, the anemone festival usually held in the south. It turned out that those four weekends were too long.

The first year, Alter said, not many people came, “but Aliza and I really enjoyed the festival,” he said, laughing with her.

Last year, they decided to hold the festival despite the trauma of October 7, 2023, when Israel’s Bedouin community also suffered heavy losses.

Twenty-one Bedouins were killed, some while working on the farms of the communities that were attacked, during the Hamas terror onslaught that saw some 1,200 people butchered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. Another six Bedouins were taken hostage; two were released at the end of November, and one, Samer al-Talalka, was one of three hostages accidentally killed by IDF gunfire while trying to escape.

In the months after the war began, the cultural center housed Rahat’s “war room,” a volunteer effort run by Bedouin and Jewish Israelis to bring aid to the communities of the south, including Rahat, offering psychological help, donations, and bereavement support.

Alter said that getting involved and coming up with ideas is therapeutic for him.

“I don’t think, I just do,” said Alter. “But I’m in trauma, or post-trauma, or just sad, and I try to get myself out of it by doing.”

He acknowledged that this has been difficult. Alter knows dozens of people killed and taken hostage, mentioning the recently released hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen as someone he has sat and spoken with many times.

In the last year, said Alter, he has arranged a cultural gathering every Saturday for members of Kibbutz Nir Oz currently living in nearby Carmei Gat. Alter and his wife are currently living in Rahat — and are probably the only Israeli Jews in town, he said.

The veteran of community-based cultural organizations moved to Rahat seven months ago, after commuting between his former home in the central city of Modi’in and Rahat for several years.

He grew up in Shoval, a community located across from Rahat, and was disturbed by the ongoing news reports of crime in the Bedouin community. He kept thinking to himself, “How bad could it be?”

“I told him, ‘Forget about this idea, it’s a terrible idea,’” said Abdelkader, who keeps inviting Alter and his wife for tea and meals at her Rahat home.

“I wanted to live in this place, to be invited to people’s homes and invite them to me,” he said. “Every day, I was on the road, Rahat to Modi’in and Modi’in to Rahat.”

It is challenging to live in Rahat, acknowledged Alter, but interesting.

“I got tired of talking the talk about shared society, I wanted to live it,” he said.

Now he is thinking about the cultural mile he wants to create in Rahat, already partially established with the cultural center, a museum for Bedouin culture, and a new library.

“We did it in Jerusalem,” said Alter, referring to the city’s development of museums, theaters, and cultural centers, all within walking distance of one another. “Why not in Rahat?”