Economy
Palestine's 'Speed Sisters' Are a Driving Force
The documentary about the Middle East’s first all-female race car driving team reveals the realities of life in the cities of the West Bank.
The Canadian-Lebanese filmmaker Amber Fares, whose documentary about female Palestinian race car drivers, Speed Sisters, opens in New York City tomorrow, didn’t come to the film’s topic through a love of the sport.
“After 9/11,” she says, “there was a shift in consciousness. I started to feel like a stranger in my home.” Mosques were vandalized in Fares’s hometown in Alberta, and her family received threatening calls telling them to “go back to where they came from.” Fares set out to have a better understanding of the Middle East. “I wanted to be able to combat stereotypes and what was happening in Canada,” she says.