Okay, hello everybody. Welcome to this bonus episode where on today I am very excited to be talking to the filmmaker David Osset, who is the director of the new documentary mayor, which is a portrait of the mayor of the city of Ramallah, the West Bank city.

I guess we'll just start by saying if I could describe this movie to someone who's wondering about seeing it, I would say it's probably the funniest movie ever made about the sort of twin comedic goldmines subjects of municipal government and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

I was just wondering like, how aware were you starting out this project and filming it about these sort of very black comedic aspects of it?

Thanks, yeah. When I first conceived of the idea, I was expecting that the film could be funny because I think that local government is funny and bureaucracy is funny or rather it's rife with humor.

I would think a lot, I mean I'm a big fan of Armando Yunu, Jesus' work and Veep and I remember hearing him talk once about what he thought satire was and he said something like that satire works when there's a series of accepted conventions and you point out when people are departing from those conventions.

I feel like bureaucracy has so many, and local government has so many built-in conventions that when those bubbles break as they often do when you're dealing with an occupied country or dealing with a city that doesn't have a country such as Ramallah in Palestine, there were so many opportunities to use humor, black comedy to actually highlight the horrific elements of occupation even more so.

I feel like, typically the way occupation is depicted or the way films about this part of the world are showing their stories is through the lens of you know, you should care because of these atrocities that are happening but I wanted to see if I could reverse the formula and reverse the formula a little bit and try to make it more oriented around well.

This is like maybe your home in some ways except that there are tanks on the fringes of town and there's tear gas exploding around you and trying to just give some essentially some western relativity to a place that doesn't often receive it in media treatment.

I mean you bring up Armando Ianucci and anyone who is seeing either VEEP or the thick of it will recognize that you capture like many real life moments unscripted that seem that they are like straight out of one of those shows.

The very first scene in the movie is a city council meeting in which they are basically batting around ideas about how to brand the city of Ramallah and a lot of it deals with like their sort of the slogan or sort of like a big sign they have everywhere that just says we Ramallah but the R is a different color so it's supposed to read we are Ramallah but nobody really seems to like be catching on to that or it's not popping the way they they talk about they they hoped it would.

And then they start talking about like well what are the things that people like you know the Minnesota is the you know land of 10,000 lakes like what's the thing about Ramallah it's totally specific to us and the ideas they come up with are traffic lights sidewalks and trees.

Yeah I mean I think it's funny because you know that we Ramallah thing is is kind of borrowed from the Amsterdam branding and there's there's a couple moments where you when you're walking around downtown Ramallah you can actually kind of if you squint you can feel as though you're in some sort of trendy European style capital city in that there are you know there's hips their bars everywhere there's there's free unlimited public Wi-Fi there's a jackpot.

It's historically a Christian city so there's you know there's plenty of bars there's there's you know you can you can buy alcohol in many places there's Christmas decorations obviously and that's a big theme throughout the film is that it takes place between two Christmas times.

I think of it as a kind of a Christmas movie actually which is one of the reasons we wanted to add it to the can it exactly yeah and I mean part of all that is is there's actually a lot of things that we can do.

There's actually kind of a deeper tragedy in a sense buried underneath that which is that Ramallah and and Musa is the mayor of Ramallah Musa Hadid who's a Christian man in his mid fifties who's a very charismatic guy and he's really you know charming and funny and he's a really great leader in all these ways but there's also this kind of performance of respectability for the West that's happening when you see the way the city is is looking so friendly and having a chance to see the city.

So friendly and having these English slogans and I don't think that that's the faults of of anyone and that's not certainly something that I would indict the municipality of Ramallah for doing it's that this is the way in which you know people from the global South are kind of expected to represent themselves to the rest of the world and certainly in a place like Palestine that is seen in such a monolithic way as a land of victims or a land of terrorists.

It almost makes sense as to why if someone's coming in to Ramallah saying well how can we make this city look friendly or that we try to basically make it look like more Western friendly and you see a lot of that in the city and so the film kind of begins with with these almost kind of quirky representations but as you go through the story of the movie they take on a more sinister meaning and a darker truth which is true of a lot of other elements.

Of the way the film represents the city of Ramallah.

Yeah absolutely I mean so you brought him up your subject Moussa Hadid who is the mayor of Ramallah and I'm just wondering how did you come how did you sort of discover this guy and how did you decide that he was going to be the subject of your film.

Well you know I've been working in the Middle East off and on for about a decade and I was actually studying in Cairo I was going to I was studying refugee law before I got into filmmaking.

So I visited Ramallah a couple of times and then eventually I got into filmmaking and I was editing a documentary by a Palestinian filmmaker and that film was called off frame.

It's just like four years ago so I went to work on the edit and it had been years since I've been back and I was I was blown away by how much the city had changed and that all of a sudden it seemed like there were all these things I was just mentioning these bars and and this night life and all these things and I kind of just filed it away but when Mahana the director of that film came to me.

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