DAVID CHIVERS

I was honored to speak with Rashid Masharawi — the first Palestinian filmmaker ever invited to Cannes, and founder of the Masharawi Fund, whose anthology film From Ground Zero was shortlisted for the 2025 Oscars. We start with how he came to filmmaking at all: growing up in Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza, painting as a teenager because there was no electricity to watch television, and getting his first camera almost by accident — left unsold in a second-hand seller's bag because nobody in the camp needed a camera when they needed bread. He talks about filming in secret during the First Intifada, when carrying a camera was as dangerous as carrying a weapon, and smuggling footage out of a closed military zone to reach international news networks.

We go on to talk about identity and cinema without borders — his refusal to recognise the "green line" in his own filmmaking, since for him Palestinian identity is cultural rather than bureaucratic — and the complicated politics of Palestinian-Israeli co-productions, which he's largely avoided throughout his career. The conversation turns to From Ground Zero, the 22-short-film anthology he produced from inside Gaza during the current war, made with filmmakers who were themselves living through what they were documenting. We talk about the deliberate choices behind it: no overt anger, no direct blame, no mention of Hamas — a decision to make cinema as testimony rather than reaction, so the films don't age the moment the news cycle moves on.

"Once you belong to a nation, to a society who have history, who have identity, who have culture, cinema can take all these elements."

"I want to free the cinema. I want to free our message. For me, films — it's like dreams, like thoughts. Nobody can occupy dreams. Nobody can occupy thoughts."

“You need to be honest and you need to tell the truth. You need to think cinema. And you need to have something to say.”

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Ep. 1 with Michael Gallen touched on his path from folk band to opera composer — in this second part, I dig into the actual music itself: his influences (Steve Reich, John Adams, Arvo Pärt's Fratres), the rhythmic idioms running through his work, and where his compositional voice comes from.

We talk about the Irish unaccompanied singing tradition and what it shares with a Mahler symphony — Michael's argument that ornamented, unaccompanied song carries the same emotional depth as any concert hall tradition, just through different means. We also get into his process: how he composes away from the piano when writing for orchestra so the instruments' own timbres shape the music rather than being filtered through piano voicing, the voice notes he leaves himself on walks, and the large hand-drawn maps he uses to plan a piece's structure before writing a note down. He also opens up about the physical toll of intense composition periods, and why he's shifted his focus toward longevity over creative extremes now that he has a family.

"I think it would be a shame then as an Irish composer in 2024 not to feel like that's part of the lineage of the composition tradition that I come from."

"What matters is what happens between the performer and the audience — that's a chasm of another world."

"I've learned now that the best thing to do is just to get up and work."

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For the first episode of Make Art Not War, I sit down with Irish composer Michael Gallen — met while performing his commissioned work for orchestra and folk ensemble Bòd on Altar with Orchestre de Bretagne. We talk about moving between songwriting and contemporary composition, the pressure to sound "experimentally valid," and how growing up near the Irish border shaped the themes running through his work — including his opera Elsewhere, based on the true story of asylum workers who declared an independent Soviet commune in 1919.

Michael Gallen is an Irish composer and founder of Straymaker, an opera and music theatre company. His opera Elsewhere premiered at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2021 and has since toured Ireland. His new production, The Curing Line, premieres at Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2025 before travelling to the Copenhagen Opera Festival, and has been shortlisted for the Fedora Opera Prize 2025.

"When you become a fully fledged adult and you understand the degree of genius that has to go into simplicity in order for an audience to feel something that they haven't felt before..."

"Does something happen when it's put in front of an audience? I think that has to be considered as part of the benchmark of the quality of the piece of music."

“The most amazing thing is when people come up to you and talk about some form of healing that's occurred, that through your work you've helped somebody surmount a barrier that seemed insurmountable to them before that.”

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