Growing up under military dictatorship in Chile—which, you might be surprised to learn, is home to some half a million Palestinians—Marcelo Piña always felt he understood the Palestinian plight. So when the Palestinian soccer team began courting Chilean players to improve its chances of competing in the 2006 World Cup, he saw it as an opportunity to humanize their cause. “People have become numb to the conflict,” Piña says. “They hear about it all the time, but they don’t know the chronology or what it’s about. Football is a language that a lot of people understand.”
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The team’s journey began in 1998 when FIFA, the World Cup’s governing body, granted the Palestinian team accreditation for the first time since 1940—effectively recognizing Palestine as an independent state. Nicola Hadwa, a second-division Chilean coach born in Beit Jala, was hired to manage the team in 2002. Because the region had no professional league to encourage new talent and Israeli forces imposed tight restrictions on movement in the area, Hadwa sought players from across the Palestinian diaspora, particularly in South America. The campaign brought in the likes of Roberto Bishara, a star defender from Santiago, and greatly improved the team’s chances of representing Palestine in the World Cup.
Piña says the first time he crossed the heavily guarded checkpoint at Allenby Bridge from Jordan into Israel he immediately thought of his experience growing up in Chile. Piña was two years old in 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist government in a coup backed by the Nixon administration. The dictator’s 17-year reign was marked by poverty, repression, and the disappearances of the regime’s enemies.
Because he couldn’t find an affordable Arabic-speaking editor here, he relocated to Cairo in February 2006 to shape his 300 hours of footage into a finished film. He spent nearly two years in editing, paying the bills as a freelance postproduction supervisor for Critical Moments, the Arabic-language version of ER, and doing video work for Spanish installation artist Soledad Sevilla.
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