Film note
Martyr Street: growing up on Hebron's emptied Shuhada Street
A Canadian crew was filming children in Hebron when the Second Intifada began. Shelley Saywell went back to find them, and the street she found was nearly empty.
In September 2000 a Canadian film crew was in Hebron, filming children for Shelley Saywell's documentary A Child's Century of War. Then the Second Intifada broke out. The children the crew had come to interview were no longer describing a conflict from some safe distance. They were inside it, on their own street, while the camera was still running.
History Television later commissioned Saywell to go back and follow the children of that street. The result is Martyr Street, a feature-length documentary whose English title is a plain translation. Shuhada means martyrs in Arabic, and Shuhada Street is where the crew had been working. It is a heavy word to carry on a title card, and the film earns it through patience more than through slogans.
What the filmmakers found on their return became the film's first subject. The street was nearly deserted, emptied of most of its Palestinian residents, and hard to enter at all without official permission. A project meant to check in on some children ended up recording an absence as well. That double focus is the reason to seek it out.
How a market street went quiet
Hebron is the only city in the West Bank where Israeli settlers live in the centre, a short walk from Palestinian homes and shops. It is also where Abraham, revered by Jews and Muslims alike, is believed to be buried, at the site Jews call the Cave of the Patriarchs and Muslims call the Ibrahimi Mosque. Few places hold so much shared reverence and so little shared space.
Shuhada Street was once one of the city's main market streets. Its emptying happened in stages, and the order matters for anyone trying to read what Saywell's camera shows.
| Year | What happened | What it meant for the street |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler, killed 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs | Closures of Shuhada Street began in the aftermath |
| 1997 | The Hebron Protocol divided the city into H1, under the Palestinian Authority, and H2, under Israeli military control, including the old city and the settler enclaves | The street lay inside H2 |
| 2000 | The Second Intifada began in September | Shops on the street were closed during and after the uprising |
| Later | Further restrictions | The street was closed to Palestinian vehicles, and to Palestinian pedestrians along much of its length |
Violence in Hebron has killed and wounded Palestinians and Israelis over the decades, and each community in the city keeps its own calendar of grief. The table is not a history of either. It is the minimum a viewer needs to understand how a busy commercial road became a place where a film crew needed clearance to set up a tripod.
Filming an absence
A documentary about an emptied street has an odd problem at its core. Its main location is defined by what no longer happens there. Shuttered doors do not give interviews, and while a camera can hold on them for as long as an editor allows, the meaning of a closed shop depends on knowing it was once open. That knowledge has to come from somewhere.
Here the earlier footage does real work. Because Saywell had already filmed in Hebron before the street emptied, Martyr Street can set its present against a recent past rather than asking the audience to imagine one. The repeat visit is among the oldest tools documentary has. It works best when the change is visible without narration, and on Shuhada Street the change is written into the place as much as into the people.
The permission itself deserves a viewer's attention. When a crew must be cleared to film on a street, the clearance becomes part of the record before a single question is asked. It shapes where the camera can stand, how long it can stay, and who will speak in front of it. The same issue appears at a much higher pitch in Saywell's Hamas: Behind the Mask, discussed in a separate film note on access documentaries.
Children who keep growing
Filming a child once is delicate. Filming the same child across years is harder, because the person who agreed to be filmed is not the person who will live with the result. A young child cannot weigh what it means to appear in a broadcast documentary about a conflict, and a parent consenting on the child's behalf is making a guess about a future nobody can see. By the time a film airs, its young subjects may hold different views, live somewhere else, or wish the footage gone.
Variety's reviewer read the film as an account of the conflict's escalation traced through the lives of two young girls. That is the strength of the longitudinal method in a sentence. A single visit captures what a child says. A return visit can show what the child has absorbed in between: which words have entered the vocabulary, which fears have set, which games have stopped. Time does the arguing, and it argues more persuasively than any voice-over.
It is also the method's risk. Children growing up in a conflict are easily turned into emblems, one per side, their faces asked to carry a thesis the film has not argued. The better films about childhood and war resist this by letting children be inconsistent, funny, bored and wrong, the way children are everywhere. A wider survey of documentaries about childhood and conflict traces how different filmmakers have handled that pressure, and the questions in the magazine's piece on consent and safety when filming survivors apply with extra force when the subjects are minors in a militarized place.
There is a practical layer too. In a city where a family's address, faith and connections can carry consequences, showing a child's face and street is never a neutral act. A viewer cannot know what precautions any particular production took and should not assume either way. The question still belongs in any serious viewing.
The adults around them
Saywell's earlier film had listened mainly to children. Martyr Street widens the frame to take in the adults who surround them: soldiers, teachers, people with hardline views, and fatalists who have stopped expecting anything to change. That is the film's most important structural decision. It is also the right one.
Children do not invent their politics. They learn them from teachers and relatives, from the soldier at the corner, from the neighbour who no longer says good morning. A film that showed only children would invite viewers to treat what they say as either innocent truth or tragic indoctrination, depending on the viewer's sympathies. Putting the adults on screen makes the transmission visible. A viewer can begin to trace where a child's phrases might have come from, and that is a more honest kind of understanding than pity.
The fatalists may be the hardest presence to sit with. A hardline view at least proposes something, however alarming. Fatalism proposes nothing, and it may be the attitude children absorb most easily, because it asks nothing of them. Giving all of these adults room to speak is not an endorsement. A documentary that includes a hardliner is reporting on the world its children live in, and leaving that voice out would make the world look simpler than it is.
Abraham at the root
The film also reaches much further back, to Abraham, the patriarch both Jews and Muslims revere and whom tradition places in a tomb in Hebron. It is a natural move for a film about this city, and a double-edged one.
On one side, the long view is honest. Jewish and Muslim attachment to Hebron is ancient and sincere, and neither community's bond with the city can be dismissed as a recent political invention. On the other, reaching back thousands of years can make a conflict look eternal, as though the shuttered shops of the present had been written into scripture. They were not. The closures followed specific events, on specific dates, decided by specific people and institutions, and the table above lists only the most basic of them.
The shrine over the tomb carries both readings at once. It is a place of shared ancestry and the scene of the 1994 killings that preceded the first closures of the street. A film that reaches back to Abraham while following children through the present asks its audience to keep two time scales in mind at once. That is a useful discipline, and it is rarer in documentary than it should be.
Five questions to bring to a screening
These are meant for classrooms, film societies and anyone watching alone. They suit Martyr Street and most documentaries about children in conflict, and the magazine's guide to watching documentaries critically takes the same approach further.
- When was each sequence filmed, and how much time passed between visits? The gaps are where the change happens, and a film that blurs them is asking for trust it has not explained.
- Who is not on screen? A street emptied of most of its residents is also a story about the people who left, and their absence shapes every frame that remains.
- Are the children allowed to be ordinary? Watch for moments when a child is simply a child, and for moments when the edit seems to ask a child to stand in for an entire people.
- Where do the adults' ideas reappear? Tracing a way of speaking from a teacher or a soldier to a child is the film's method, and it rewards active attention rather than passive sympathy.
- What would each community in Hebron say is missing? Asking this honestly, for Palestinians and for Israelis, is the fastest way to see a documentary's frame instead of only its picture.
None of these questions has a single right answer, and a good discussion will produce disagreement. That is fine. The aim is to keep the children on screen in view as people with futures, rather than as illustrations of a position someone in the audience already held.
A pairing worth making
If both films can be found, watch Martyr Street alongside A Child's Century of War, the documentary that had brought Saywell's crew to Hebron in September 2000. Seen together they become a record of before and after, made by the same filmmaker on the same ground. The before is a street with children on it. The after is the same street with its shutters down, and a title that translates its name.
