‘Edward Said: Between Worlds’ Brings an Articulate Palestinian Spokesman Back to Life

With producers Jigsaw, Dogwoof, Impact Partners, and Louverture behind it, the movie is seeking distribution at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Making a documentary about an ardent Palestinian activist was not easy. It took two years and 11 executive producers, for one thing, plus powerful producers like Louverture Films, Jigsaw Productions, and Impact Partners, to get “Edward Said: Between Worlds” made. Cinetic Media and Dogwoof are handling domestic and international sales, respectively, at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the nonfiction film world premieres on September 12.

The reason the film is still an orphan is simple. It’s about Palestine. “We’re getting a lot of interest internationally for distribution, but obviously the uphill battle is domestic U.S. and Canada distribution,” said producer Sarah Mowaswes. “Even though it’s about Edward Said, who’s universally beloved, it takes a strong village for us. When we started this filmmaking process, we applied for institutional funding, and unfortunately, it coincided with the Trump administration pulling a lot of institutional funding and a lot of these institutions seizing up and becoming scared. So for us, it became more of a practice in finding individual partners who would work with us, and that came in the form of Alex Gibney [Jigsaw], Jocelyn Barnes [Louverture], Jenny [Raskin] and Gerilyn [Dreyfous] at Impact Partners, and then also a lot of EPs on the back end to provide funding. It’s been an uphill battle.”

The filmmakers are holding out for a distributor with enough marketing resources to push the movie to a wide audience. There was staff support at streamers like Netflix and Apple, said producer-director Maiken Baird (“Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich”). “But they’re constricted by the powers that be.”

Clearly, it is not the usual drill to fashion a biodoc around someone who is 20 years dead. Baird had known Said at Columbia University in the ’80s. “He was an academic rock star,” she said. “He was incredibly smart, handsome. He had an incredible sense of style. So I did know his voice and his wisdom. I thought his voice was so lacking in our current world, and his humanity, and his understanding, his own personal experience of Palestine, and his ability to speak about it. It was a no-brainer. After October 7th, I thought, ‘let’s bring it back.'”

She checked out the archives. The rich Columbia University archive was already digitized. “When I realized that there was so much footage of him out there,” said Baird, “and so many other documentaries, as well as lectures that have been recorded, and radio shows, all over the world in Arabic, and he spoke perfect French, and there were Dutch interviews, and Swedish television. There was an incredible amount of material to work with. It was like a godsend, truly. And his father had picked up an eight millimeter camera in the ’30s and ’40s and filmed Palestine, and the family before Israel was created. It was a dream come true, quite frankly.”

It took a lot of digitizing. “But we’ve preserved all of that footage that we found from all over the world,” said Baird, “and we plan to give it back and to make it accessible, so that it’s not locked up or destroyed.”

While many of us may not recognize or know Said, “he is beloved,” said Baird. “He’s not well-known in America, but the rest of the world is fully aware of Edward Said.”

The film uses Said’s cradle-to-grave story over seven decades — his origins in Palestine, his exile in Egypt and America, his growing activism and popularity — as a narrative vehicle to tell the story of Palestine. “His lived experience was the quintessential story of Palestinians and Palestine,” said Baird. “His story coincided with the history of Palestine and what happened, so it blended well together.”

The challenge was editorial. The project used three editors over a year to wrangle the documentary into submission. “It was a lot of heavy lifting,” said Baird, “of finding all the right pieces to put the whole story together, his story as well as the story of Palestine, connected, woven together throughout.”

The editing was also about finding the right balance of history, exposition, and polemic. “We used the ’82 invasion of Lebanon, which is exactly what we’re seeing today,” said Baird. “But then we didn’t do the second Intifada in 2000 because we didn’t feel that we needed it. So it was undertaking the touch points in history that we felt could help explain our world today to people who really don’t know that history.”

The movie considers Zionism a settler colonial project. “We had a lot of conversations about how to frame Zionism,” said Mowaswes, “and how to include it in the film and make it accessible for people. We make it clear in the film that Zionism and Judaism are completely separate. Zionism is a settler colonial political act, and it has nothing to do with Judaism. So we wanted to make that clear to audiences because that was the way Edward framed everything.”

Telling Said’s story in a way that wouldn’t trigger any number of knee-jerk reactions was a delicate balance. There he is beside Palestine Liberation Front leader Yasser Arafat, for example. “It was important to us to create a three-dimensional figure, not just in Edward but also in Palestine,” said Mowaswes. “Because as we see through Edward, Palestinians can be reduced to sometimes two categories. You can either be Yasser Arafat the terrorist, or you are a victim, which is seen through the genocide on someone’s phone. It was important to show a three-dimensional figure and place through Edward and to rely on his humanism. Because yes, this is a story on Edward. Yes, this is a story on Palestine. But it’s also a story about oppressed people throughout the world and how to engage with them as well.”

“Edward Said: Between Worlds” premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12 and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.