My Road Through Tribeca

My first feature film A Slim Peace premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the World
Documentary Competition this past week.

The idea is a bit crazy. To bring together a group of Palestinian, Israeli and American settlers together in a weight loss group. After three years my idea became a finished film. Along with my producer we raised the money to make the film. I asked 100 people for support and 1 person said yes. Almost everything about making A Slim Peace was a challenge. From finding women who would normally never meet to join our group to finding a place where both Palestinians and Israelis would be willing to meet and share their lives and stories. Also, to create a story from these meetings between the women while remaining neutral and objective and to make as good, entertaining and thought-provoking a film as possible!

But the last hurdle is having the chance to share the film once you have made it. Luckily, my mentor and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Leigh believed in me from the very beginning. And Peter Scarlet and his team at the Tribeca Film Festival believed in the film and selected A Slim Peace for the festival.

But the pinnacle so far was to share A Slim Peace with hundreds of New Yorkers this week. The audiences have been amazing and engaged and asked me lots of challenging questions!

Meeting the other filmmakers has been a true privilege as well. It is a lonely profession at times and to be able to share and compare notes of the experience you can learn a lot from a fellow filmmaker.

Of course this is still the beginning. The challenge now is to try secure a distributor to enable an even greater audience to share in the journey that the women undertake.

The real excitement though comes in the chance to invite other women from across the Middle East to participate in the initiative, to use it as a model to get even more people meeting and talking. I plan to head out to Israel again next month, to try facilitate another group and continue the work.

Though for now, it has a been a fantastic couple of weeks here at Tribeca. A festival which makes dreams come true for filmmakers like myself to share our stories with such great audiences, and for that opportunity I am truly grateful.

For more HuffPost coverage of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, go here.