“Sleepless in Gaza and Jerusalem”: YouTube Series on Palestinian Women

PINA TV Production and  Radiant Circle Productions announce  the March 1st opening of the premier episode of a 90-part series, “Sleepless in Gaza…and Jerusalem”, that will be launched on YouTube. It will be a video diary about four young Palestinian women, Muslim and Christian, two living in Gaza and two in Arab Jerusalem/West Bank.

The series will follow Ashira Ramadan, a broadcast journalist based in Jerusalem; Ashira’s friend in Gaza, the documentary film maker Nagham Mohanna; Donna Maria Mattas, a 17 year-old student at the Holy Family school in Gaza who dreams of growing up to be a journalist, and Ala’ Khayo Mkari who works with Caritas in Jerusalem.

The intention of this series is neither rant nor rhetoric. It is rather an opportunity for all of us, who do not live in Gaza, occupied Arab Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank to grasp how these four Palestinian women live out their daily lives, precisely because their lives are stories that journalists are too often told by their editors to think of almost dismissively as human interest and almost necessarily conflict driven.

Sleepless is Gaza and Jerusalem documents how –as human beings — these four Palestinians can also experience moments of personal and community achievement, and the warmth of friends and family life that in real life is possible even in the most difficult circumstances of siege and occupation.

Each episode runs 26 minutes and will be shot in Jerusalem/West Bank and Gaza, edited and uploaded the same day. So you will find a new sequence six days a week at www.youtube.com/SleeplessinGaza. On Friday, we all rest.