Yousef Srouji on the Documentary, Three Promises

Learning the tools of the trade on the job

Matt here. Welcome back to Origin Stories. Our guest is Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Srouji, the creator of the critically-acclaimed documentary “Three Promises.”

Yousef uses his mother’s old home video footage to tell an intimate story of life during the Second Intifada. He talks about learning the tools of the trade on the job.

Yousef is a rare thing: an entirely self-taught (and very successful) documentarian. What I wanted most from my interview with him was to understand how he approached the medium as a newbie. I wanted to get at his process and approach and influences.

Yousef discusses the difficulty of finding distribution for “Three Promises,” despite the project being largely apolitical.

As for his next project, Srouji, a successful entrepreneur, is content to wait for it to arrive: “I don’t like to depend on the creative process for my income. Well, let’s put it that way: when it becomes a need for me to create, it’s not from the heart anymore.”

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Thanks,

Matt