Using This Guide

This guide is designed for people who want to use Mayorto engage and inspire family friends, classmates, colleagues, and communities in honest, though challenging, conversations. It is an invitation for dialogue that requires preparation before you and your community dive in as well as a commitment for all participants to be fully present. Conversations that invoke experiences of political violence and exclusion; and/or feelings of belonging, safety, and identity can be difficult to begin and facilitate. This resource offers support and structure to guide the process. In contrast to debates in which participants try to convince others that they are right, this guide envisions dialogue undertaken in a spirit of openness and active listening where divergent viewpoints are heard and responded to with care and respect.

Individuals and communities may also come to the conversation using Mayorwith varying degrees of knowledge, as well as dynamic and different experiences. The discussion prompts are intentionally crafted to help a wide range of audiences think more deeply about the topics in the film. Rather than attempting to address them all, choose the questions that best meet your needs and interests. And be sure to leave time to consider taking action.Planning next steps can help people leave the room feeling energized and optimistic, even in instances when conversations have been difficult and/or uncomfortable. Whenever possible, please consider a closing activity that gives participants an opportunity to offer gratitude to one another before closing.

For more detailed event planning and facilitation tips, visit communitynetwork.amdoc.org.

Letter From The Filmmaker

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East over the past decade, but I’ve always been struck by Ramallah in particular as a city in conflict both inside and out - divided between capitalist future-building and preservation of a rapidly-vanishing past; a city of artsy hipster bars and high-security Israeli checkpoints. You won’t find terrorists or camels in Ramallah, only the occasional snowstorm and free unlimited public WiFi. In other words, it thoroughly pierces the Western narrative as to what “The Middle East” is “supposed” to look like.

When I met Musa Hadid - the Christian, liberal, charismatic mayor of Ramallah with a vape pen always by his side and a radical plan to turn Ramallah’s public space into a Middle Eastern version of Amsterdam - I knew there was a unique way to understand the discourse around Palestine by following him in his daily work; work that is repeatedly and regularly interrupted by a colonial military apparatus that has control over his city’s land and well being.

Ken Loach once said that “a film isn’t a political movement - at best, it can add its voice to public outrage.” However, in the case of Palestine, the politics around its representation are entirely created by popular culture: cinema, television, news functioning as entertainment, all contribute to a Western narrative that defines Palestine through its victimhood - at best. Palestinian identity, for those abroad, becomes its lack of identity.

I wanted to make a film that shifts the narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict away from intractible debate, and instead tell a story of a small town mayor dealing with small town problems amid a military occupation of his city. We are living in an era when discussing the rights and humanity of Palestinians has been written into legislation in several countries as an act of hate against another nation of people. Very quietly and obliquely, MAYOR challenges the logic of this assertion.

MAYOR also follows the dramatically underreported consequences of American foreign policy on a nation persistently denied autonomy and representation on the international stage. I set out to make a film about local government in the shadow of an occupation, and quickly found myself filming during one of the most traumatic times in Ramallah’s history - where even the small public space that Musa labors over becomes a symbol of resistance and identity by the end of the film. My goal was to break down the audience’s understanding of what a Middle Eastern city “should” look like within the first five minutes - Christmas celebrations, classical music, even an old Hollywood feel - and build a new framework of understanding for how that audience can relate to this part of the world.

— David Osit, Filmmaker