Tom Hayes: Challenges And Changes In 25 Years Working On Israel-Palestine Issues

Tom Hayes, Lecturer in the Film Division at Ohio University, originally hails from Vermont. At the age of 15 he won the Kentucky Educational Television Young Peoples Film Competition. He worked his way through film school in the 70’s crewing on cargo ships, and working as a drive-in projectionist. Working as media freelance on commercial productions enabled him to pursue his independent documentary projects. Hayes’s first long form documentary focused on the experience of Cambodian refugees, from their lives in a refugee camp on the Cambodian border, through their first year of resettlement in the U.S. That film, Refugee Road, was broadcast nationwide on PBS.

In the early eighties his interest turned from the Cambodian refugee experience to the odd situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Weathering the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and ongoing civil strife, he produced Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile, narrated by Martin Sheen. Once faced with the realities of the Palestinian experience, Hayes became engaged with the issue and continued documenting the human and political rights situation of this human community for decades. The Independent Television Service funded his film, People and The Land, about the role of the United States during the first Palestinian Intifadah. His latest film, Two Blue Lines, integrates footage Hayes began gathering in 1983, up to the present.