Much like the characters they portray, Cameron Van Hoy (Israeli David) and Danielle Pollack (Palestinian Fatima) are passionate—passionate about changing the world, about love, and about each other—as both on- and off-screen lovers.
I met the very talented Van Hoy and Pollack at a local Starbucks, in Venice Beach, Calif., where we discussed their experience making this bold and emotional film.
The quietly assured Pollack, a beautiful young woman with a dark complexion and an earned ballet dancer’s physique, explained her understanding of Israel’s current situation as captured in David & Fatima.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I got that there are two sides of a story—I got to see both sides clearly. No one is right or wrong, but a lot of injustice is going on …Growing up with the opposite point of view (as a Jew raised in New York), I take away the passion of Fatima. I got to really love and understand my neighbor.”
David & Fatima is the brain child of executive producer/writer Kari Bian and writer/ director Alain Zaloum. Zaloum brings his own personal and heartfelt perspective to the controversial project. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the movie’s Beverly Hills premiere on Sept. 12, where he explained that he modeled the character of David after himself. Zaloum, like the open-minded character David, is also in an interfaith relationship.
“People want you to take sides,” explained Zaloum, “I felt it was honest, from my heart; I took the middle road.”
To create an authentic voice, Zaloum worked on the script closely with actors Pollack and Van Hoy.
With an absorbing gaze and warm manner, Van Hoy talked about his preparation for the film, admitting that he, like most young Americans, had a marginal knowledge of the situation in the Middle East prior to David & Fatima.
“I wanted to understand it as an actor. At the same time, I needed to understand it myself.” So he spent a great deal of time researching on Youtube and by immersing himself in Israeli culture at “an Israeli place in the Valley, talking to Israelis and eating their food.”
Van Hoy, who attended New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts—where he met Pollack—drew on the experience of being in New York during 9/11 to reference what it might be like to grow up in Israel under the constant threat of terrorism.
“Young Israeli kids live with a different set of experiences— with suicide bombing, and war, and they know they have to join the army when they grow up— and that affects them,” he said.
Both Van Hoy and Pollack agreed that so much of the film was “meant to be,” including the people who participated in its creation, and that this enigmatic quality of enthusiasm and conviction carried through. “No one could have stopped this movie from being made,” said Van Hoy.
Perhaps its message of renewal and cultural transcendence will have the same tenacity and resolve.
“I met an Israeli who came to the movie with a friend of his, who is Palestinian, and the two of them enjoyed the movie, and they thought it was an important movie,” explained Van Hoy. “It’s so powerful—for me it was more than acting. It was living it and being it, and to have that experience and to have it captured on film is so amazing to me. I just hope the rest of the world can see what I’ve learned, which is that the power of love and being totally committed to love—being so passionate about someone or something.”
Friends Read Free