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The Newsweek cover

No kidding. HBO originally tried to send a couple of known American producers to get the story and they couldn't get anywhere with Ayat's family. How were you able to gain the Palestinian family's confidence and get access to them?

Don't forget I'm Israeli. That's actually supposedly harder. It took time. Perseverance. I was slowly working it out and developing my relationship with them, and the keys were to understand the culture and be sensitive to them. I don't know the filmmakers that tried and why they weren't able to, I can only tell you how I kept coming and coming and coming and developing a relationship until we got close enough.

At the beginning, actually, I was too scared to go in. So I used to meet my crew at the [refugee camp] checkpoint and send them in. For the longest time I would tell them "You know, today I'm too busy. I'll see you after." I grew up near Tel Aviv, and the closest camp to my house is maybe fifty miles away. I'd never seen a refugee camp in my life.

Really?

You don't just go to a Palestinian refugee camp if you're Israeli. Before the film, I probably thought about the refugee camp the same way you do. I had no idea really. And I was scared of the unknown. So [finally my crew] literally put me in a car and took me over there. It took a few times before I felt comfortable, and then it was great. And I was okay even to walk by myself in the camp.

But then the time where I was stopped [and taken to the police station for four hours] was really a tough time for me.

How were you treated?

They treated me fine. But it was just the hard realization of what it meant. We were near the market and all the people were saying "There is a Jew in the car." What I realized is that I'm in the midst of a conflict and I represent one side of it, so it doesn't matter how many Palestinian friends I have and what kind of work I'm doing, I'm still Israeli. And you know it only takes one extremist … so it was really scary and disappointing.

For every Israeli, the police headquarters are very symbolic because there was a famous incident when two Israelis got lost and somehow got into [a Palestinian refugee camp] and were taken to the police headquarters and lynched. But of course like everybody else in the region we have a really short memory. So actually during the [eventual] satellite meeting between the mothers, I was with the Palestinian family.

Avigail Levy, Rachel's mother

The film seems very intentionally balanced between the points of view of the Israeli and Palestinian families. Was it important to you to try to be impartial in how you showed both sides?

I always try to be careful with the word balance, because I don't know if there is balance. What is balance? And I would also say that I'm Israeli, so I have a natural bias. But I think that what I was trying to do was to really stay true to the mothers in presenting their truth. And I think to me also it shows how complex the conflict is because nobody's right and nobody's wrong. Or in other words, everybody's right and everybody's wrong.

Did you find that your own views changed at all through the making of the film?

I think that spending so much time with Avigail, and spending time at the camp, were great and deep learning experiences. It really created deeper understanding. But I don't think I changed my views.

How are the conditions in the camp?

Bad. There are no roads, everything looks unfinished. Everything is like bare minimum. But I think more than anything is the notion: "We are not free." The notion you don't have a country is harder than the actual physical conditions.

Um Samir and Abu Samir, Ayat's parents

That certainly seems to come out in the film. In the end there were too many obstacles to having the mothers meet in person, so they met by satellite. How did the meeting compare with your hopes for it?

I was born hopeful and I always do hope to get to a reconciliation or understanding and peace. But that's not realistic, because reality is different, and we are in a very tense time. The meeting is the microcosm for the conflict, unfortunately.

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