Vanessa talks with Farouk Abdul-Aziz
A film by Roy Battersby, UK
(1980)
That One Oscar Night
Out of 61 international prizes awarded to her in the glow of 61 luminous nights over four decades since 1966, including five Oscar nominations, and one win, that One Oscar Night of the 3rd of April, 1978, stands out in my memory, thirty years after, as the ultimate summation of a woman’s life.
I wasn’t one of the 180 million who watched the Oscars’ live presentation that night. But I had the opportunity to meet Vanessa for the first time only a few weeks before in March 1978. Fresh from south Lebanon, slightly before the Israeli war machine hit the region, she flew in to Baghdad to premiere her timely and sweeping 3 hour documentary, “The Palestinian”, at the 3rd International Film Festival on Palestine. In my first interview with her, produced for Baghdad Television, I asked if someone had told her that the 3 hour format is a bit unusual duration for a documentary, she looked me in the eye and bluntly put it:” Do you think that 3 hours is a long duration to finally tell the story of a people so long ignored for 30 years?”
For me it sounded like a long waited apologia on behalf of the Western media. For her it was a confirmation of a pledge she has taken to make up for it wherever and whenever she could.
In my 2 subsequent press interviews, published in Arabic and English same year, I came to realize that Vanessa’s world is too wide to contain in those interviews albeit detailed.
Two weeks in May 1978, the idea to produce a full-fledged documentary was ripe in my head. She welcomed it right away.
