Ameen Nayfeh: “I wanted to put the audience into this journey…how it is today to live in Palestine”

Ameen Nayfeh’s award winning film 200 Meters opens the 2021 Boston Palestine Film Festival. Director of Programming Michael Maria connected with Ameen to learn more about this Palestinian thriller that follows the dramatic efforts of a father trying to unite with his son on the other side of the Israeli segregation wall.   

Q: 200 Meters is your first feature Narrative film. How did filming and production compare to your previous shorts such as The Crossing? What particular challenges did you face?

A: I cannot compare, because it’s very different, there’s a huge difference between making a short and making a feature film, in my short films I was dealing with a very small crew, three to four actors, in 200 Meters it was 35 cast, 55 locations, I don’t know the crew it was sometimes like 40 people working, so it was a big difference not just in the size of the team and the cast but also that comes with responsibility toward the project. The biggest challenge was also financing, 200 Meters was a very long and difficult journey. For the shorts, some I did with friends and some I did with very very very small budgets, but 200 Meters couldn’t have been done like that because we needed to tell the story properly and we had to wait to find the money to be able to tell it, and that was the biggest challenge, I would say.