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When director Amber Fares came out with her documentary Speed Sisters, about the Middle East’s first all-women race car driving team, the New York Times praised it as “unconventional in form as well as content.”
Many films about that part of the world have depicted Arab women cloaked in niqabs, obscuring their uniqueness as individuals. But here, Marah, Mona, Noor and Betty sport logo-covered racing jumpsuits as they tear around streets of the West Bank. “I do it for the release,” says Mona of the adrenaline rush that comes from burning rubber on hot pavement.
Doc Talk podcast co-host John Ridley revisits the film with Fares several years after its initial release, a documentary that takes on new significance with the ongoing conflagration in Gaza, only a few miles distant from the West Bank. Ridley also reckons with the director’s short film Reckoning with Laughter, about the daring Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster, who spent her formative years in Neve Shalom/Wāħat as-Salām (“Oasis of Peace”), an unusual community outside of Jerusalem where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side – by choice.
Fares grew up in Canada, in a family of Lebanese descent. She describes how 9/11 dramatically changed her life dramatically, turning her from a person who never questioned her identity as a Canadian into an outsider, in some respects, in her own country.
That’s on the new episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s Documentary Editor. Doc Talk is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, presented with support from National Geographic Documentary Films.
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