Collapsing the Polarity of the Personal and the Political: An Interview with Phoebe Cottam

Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize in the International Shorts Competition at the 48th Drama Short International Film Festival, Phoebe Cottam’s documentary, When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon? (2025) offers an urgent meditation on the relationship of the personal and the political within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The film honours the words of the Italian artist Davide Dormino, who said: “True art always has a role and responsibility to take a stand, because the fundamental role of the artist is to help people shape their point of view in a way that liberates us. Otherwise, it just has an aesthetic function.”

Cottam’s documentary revolves around the women in one family. It follows Nawal who relocates to Berlin from Palestine. She leaves behind Neta, her Israeli anti-Zionist activist mother who lives in Nablus with her Palestinian husband, Nizar, and daughter, Salma. Not wanting her children to be burdened with the guilt and responsibility of Occupation, Neta chose not to give her children Israeli IDs. 

Nawal finds Germany, which is still carrying the guilt of the Holocaust, divided over the issue of German military support for Israel. Cottam observes the experience of what activism looks like, which is shrouded in the need for Nawal and her sister Shaden to reckon with separation because of the political and how that impacts one’s sense of identity.

Born in Scotland, Cottam lives and works in London. With a background in community education, activist filmmaking, independent documentary and television, she completed her Masters at London’s National Film and Television School. Her previous short film Hold won the award for Best British Short at the Cheap Cuts Film Festival.

In conversation with FIPRESCI, Cottam discussed engaging in the conversation of the personal and the political, disrupting preconceived narratives and distinctions between activist and political cinema.

How would you describe your relationship to cinema?

Cinema, for me, is a meditative space that can at times be deeply transformational. And cinemas are like temples. Have you ever been in a cinema when the film file corrupts halfway through or there’s an issue with the projection and it cuts out? It feels so brutal and violent. I think this speaks to how spiritually important films and cinemas are. 

Sometimes I like to think of the process of sitting in the dark and watching the flickering lights as having its roots in the experience of cave people walking through the woods at night with their flickering torches casting shadows and creating illusions and tricks of the eye. I think these kinds of liminal, hallucinatory, imaginative experiences are fundamental. 

You appear to perceive cinema with a kind of poetry and so, given the poetic nature of your film’s title, I’d be curious to ask how and why you choose it? One reason I ask is Patton Oswalt in Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary Chain Reactions (2024) says a great title should tell a story in the audience’s mind before they’ve seen the film. The title you’ve chosen does just that.

The title comes from a line in a Mahmoud Darwish text in which he is having a conversation with his younger self about Palestine, his memories of his homeland and expulsion during the Nakba. It really stayed with me. Something about the absurdity of the question speaks to the absurdity of the occupation, particularly as seen through the eyes of a child. It’s very difficult to imagine what it’s like to live under military occupation unless you have experience of it, and so, I hope the question is intriguing and strange enough that it puts you in a curious state of mind.

I remember one day travelling on the bus from the West Bank to Jerusalem. It’s a very short trip if you’re in an Israeli car, but otherwise incredibly slow on a Palestinian bus having to travel through the check point. There was a little boy at the back of the bus travelling to visit his grandparents in East Jerusalem. He was showing me the coin collection he’d gathered from visitors he’d met on the bus. When we reached the checkpoint and the soldiers boarded the bus with their guns slung round their necks, checking people’s papers and evicting anyone without the correct documents, the boy stiffened and stared at the back of the seat in front. When the ordeal was over and the bus was less full, emptied of Palestinians hoping to enter East Jerusalem, to visit family, for doctor appointments, including I remember a very elderly couple, the boy turned to me and asked, “Do you have Israelis in your country?” It struck me that this boy’s only real interaction with Israelis was probably the military, who are a totally dehumanising and alienating force. How do you make sense of the occupation as a child? And in a sense, that seems the best way to try and understand it, because it doesn’t make any more sense if you’re an adult, it’s just that we have had more cause to normalise it.

Your film explores the relationship between the personal and the political, and how the two are inseparable. To my mind, this is an important conversation in our present-day reality. 

It’s always an important conversation to be honest and something I am always interested in exploring — how politics impacts our lives and particularly how it’s woven through our familial and intimate relationships in apparent ways. Like Nawal says at the end of the film, “It’s not that I love being political… it affects me so much that I cannot just not be involved.”

Perhaps it feels like an important conversation in our present-day reality because we are living in a time of multiple crises colliding at once in a way that, perhaps in the West, we have been a bit shielded from. As much as it’s possible though, it’s good to try and collapse this polarity between the personal and the political. In a way, everything can be both, and I think it’s maybe a bit of a redundant liberal distinction that encourages us to imagine our private lives as protected spaces in which we can shelter from the political — even these imagined protected bubbles are political constructions.

What struck me about the film was how you need to genuinely listen to the subjects, because there are a series of themes and ideas that emerge almost spontaneously. When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon? Is a test of how much we genuinely see and hear other people. 

I think we’re conditioned to read people’s stories in certain ways, and particularly with something so much in the news as Palestine. There tend to be only a few narratives of Palestinian identity we are regularly fed in the West: tragedy or terrorism, which are both dehumanising. Palestinian filmmakers have been disrupting these forever. So, if our film makes you really listen for the emergent themes and challenges some of these preconceived narratives as well, then I’m really glad.

One of the themes in the film is how the mother is forced to make choices that nobody should have to make. What also occurs to me is that When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon? Speaks up for the minority of Israelis that don’t agree with the status quo. This penetrates the depths of the tragedy of the conflict by looking at it through a human lens that defines it as a humanist work. 

I’m glad if the film is read as a humanist work. By imagining people only as enemies simply because they were born in a certain place and time is a very limited way of imagining solidarity and the possibilities for resistance. 

A friend who spends a lot of time on the festival circuit told me he regards festivals as being cowardly because they like political films, but they’re afraid of activist cinema. Given the political nature of When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon? And its images of activism, is there an important discussion to be had about the nuance that distinguishes political from activist cinema, and their exposure?

 It’s something I thought about a lot at the beginning of making this film, when I was in the West Bank with ISM (International Solidarity Movement), because there were a lot of crossovers between what I was filming as part of our actions and what I was filming for this film. It got very confusing at one point, but I always felt there was a distinction and something important about trying to make a film that could hold a perspective beyond just a straight activist film, because I think there can be a tendency for activist films to be a bit two-dimensional and confined in their audience and reach.

It’s maybe because there’s something too similar in what an activist does and what a filmmaker does. They are both trying to reach a wide audience, but filmmakers are trying to reach people in their private, sacred spaces and activists are trying to reach people in their public, civic life. So, if the filmmaker just becomes a vehicle for the activist’s message, then they are missing the opportunity to explore the topic in a deeper way, which isn’t to say that the activist and the filmmaker’s intentions or politics will not be aligned — they’re just seemingly too similar but fundamentally different. And I say this as someone who has been both. It’s a bit like how dreams in films are often so badly represented, because dreams and films are too closely related, I think.

But I suppose it depends on what you mean by activist cinema, because there are certainly some incredible films which feature activists and reach into the dream-like sacred space of cinema. So, it’s probably a bit of a spectrum between political and activist cinema, and I’m thinking of a film like 5 Broken Cameras (2011) or All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).

But having said all this, I do understand your friend’s criticism. And we shouldn’t forget that film festivals are often publicly funded and often nervous of losing this funding. Germany is a very clear example of how this is working at the moment. In 2024, the German state passed a resolution that tied public funding for arts and science projects that support Israel in several ways. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely you will see our film play in Germany any time soon.

So, we might go to film festivals to experience the whole spectrum of human existence, but if a festival is cutting out those activist voices that are challenging power on the front lines, then it’s depriving its audience of an important perspective. Films can be ecstatic, sublime, moving, but they can also be challenging and emboldening.

When we question the capacity of a film to change the world, and we cynically dismiss its value in this regard, we’re perhaps not considering it in the correct context. Cinema can change the perspective of an individual, which creates a gradual and less dramatic change by humanising or familiarising realities. It’s a trickle effect rather than the dramatic change we might want or imagine.

 Of course. Change can be rapid, but it can also be very slow. And in a way, we don’t have the means to predict the pace. But what we can do in the meantime is keep building understanding and solidarity and connections with each other, and chipping away. And cinemas are not a bad place to do that with each other.

Is the process of making a film transformational, where the person you were before is different to the person you are afterward?

100%. Making a film is a beautiful but also a very mortifying and confronting experience. I learned a lot about myself in the process of making this film. But one of the things I love the most about documentaries is the way in which you are transformed with the subjects of your film. I was close with Neta, Nawal and Shaden before making this film, but I feel our relationships are much stronger now and multidimensional. 

Paul Risker
©FIPRESCI 2025