We recently connected with Samer Saifan and have shared our conversation below.

Samer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My last film I just finished shooting “If Birds Believed in God” was definitely the biggest and most challenging project I have ever worked on both personally and logistically. It’s a political psychological drama short film about a young Palestinian photographer living in the diaspora in New York City. As a Palestinian, it is a very autobiographical film that helped me explore both my place in the world and the history of my family, culture, and heritage – especially with everything going on right now, I think it’s a very important unique film. And I definitely think it’s the best work I have ever done.

Samer, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Writer-Director-Producer currently in my last semester at New York University Film School.

I wrote, directed, and executive produced a Palestine short drama film, “If Birds Believed in God.” It served as my undergraduate thesis film for NYU.

In terms of scale, I worked on the script for 6 months followed by another 6 months of pre production for the film – I fundraised about $20,000 for our budget and then we shot in New York for 6 days, 12 hours each. I’m in the first month of the editing process now – it’s very exciting but also draining at the same time, you work for so long on a single story and you have to be open and share it with a team of over 30 other people, it no longer feels like it’s yours and sometimes when it gets hard, you wonder why you even chose to start in the first place, but it’s all part of the journey – it’s the way it should be, you need others to execute your vision and the actors to bring life to it with their own perspectives.

Filmmaking is a very humble art form, you spend hours and hours by yourself writing or sitting in a dark room working on your computer, all in service of trying to make people feel an emotion while they watch your story. It’s a very intoxicating feeling to have a bunch of people sit in a theater together and you have all of their attention for an hour or however long – they look up to the screen and expect to feel something, so you need to deliver or else you just waste everyone’s time. I really love making films, I hope I’m allowed to do it for the rest of my life. But we’ll see. For now, I’ll just smell the roses and be happy with the last one I made.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I’m really trying to get funding and make my first feature. I love making short films but you always have to compromise a lot and you rarely get the opportunity to fully explore an idea or subject – it can also get very frustrating being restricted with limited resources, but of course, it’s always going to be that way. On a film, there’s never enough time or money, but it would be nice to work with a real professional crew and respectable budget for once so I can just focus on the creatives. On all my films so far, I’ve always felt that I could never fully embrace the creative side of it because you always have to be practical and think about how to actually get the film made – on features, you really have a team of people around you that just let you do your job of creating visuals and working with the actors, not having to worry about anything else like paying truck drivers or scheduling lunches so your crew doesn’t go on strike.

So yeah, that’s really the end goal for me – to make my first real feature, I don’t care if it’s for millions or hundreds of thousands, I’ll take whatever I can get, I just want to work with professionals and people who really care about making quality work.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A huge lesson I learned on my last film and in the last year is that no matter how prepared you are or how much conviction you have as an artist, you can always find yourself victimized by other people’s laziness or perception of you. Some people treat me like an idiot or don’t take me seriously because I’m 21 – you have professors who don’t work in the industry or older crew members who doubt you because of your age, but of course in the end, they see the quality of the work you produce and then they understand and listen to you – but by the time that happens, you never want to work with those people again because why would you?

Making a movie is hard enough, you need to work with people that you respect and trust. The good side of it is that there are many people I’ve met that are great collaborators and artists who really helped me get to where I wanted to go. This was one of the first times on a project where I really felt supported by people whose skills and experiences I could depend on even more than my own. And I think it shows in the quality of the picture – there was a lot of care and heart put into it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.samersaifan.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samdeezi/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samersaifan/