The latest from Richard, Price of Kings director, straight from the edit suite
Must confess to feeling a little blue in the run up to the UK release of Film 1, President Arafat.
It seems a shame to move on when we learnt so much over the course of making it - from filming in the West Bank, Jordan, Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem to unearthing long-lost archive which casts a different light on current affairs.
Yesterday, whilst doing a soundcheck in the cinema for the March 13th premiere in London's West End, we randomly spooled forward and hit the play button. Arafat burst into life on the screen, alone in the gardens of his base in Tunisia, deep in thought, staring into space as he quietly contemplates whether to return to peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after an Israeli extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, had shot the negotiations to pieces by massacring worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. Not long before-hand Suha watched him "shouting and screaming", she'd "never seen him like this before - furious". It had been hard enough for Arafat to corral the various factions of the PLO to move forward with the 1993 Oslo peace deal in the first place - and now this.
Back inside, in Arafat's living room were his senior advisors, wanting him to break off talks, whilst envoys from Israel sat in the kitchen, hoping desperately that he'd come back to the negotiating table.
In the garden, Arafat looks totally alone, sitting without his customary head-dress or any hint of self-consciousness, exposing his baldness. Weighing up his choices - a return to negotiations jeopardises support from his already doubtful people but having struggled for decades and finally signed a deal with Rabin... What to do? What to sacrifice? Peace or the support of his followers? Can he trust Rabin? Is he really a partner for peace?
We spooled back and found Yitzhak Rabin on screen, veins throbbing at his temples, thundering at the world's press in response to the massacre, "The present government of Israel, will not allow this atrocity to stop the negotiations!" He's beside himself, absolutely furious, wild-eyed at the peace process having been jeopardised.
Watching the two of them together, their words reverberating in the empty cinema you couldn't help thinking on the stark contrast between those times and the current state of affairs.
