Yellowknife (June 16/03) - Fixed in the frame of the digital video camera is a rather fat man in a taxicab expounding on the reasons he's not popular with Israeli women.

Behind him in the Tel Aviv taxi, Yellowknife filmmakers Paul Gordon and Adam Bowick capture the interview on tape as Matt Frame delivers the questions.

Frame notices a box of tissues on the dashboard, and, with a comedian's timing, asks the Israeli if the tissues were there because he's so upset the girls aren't fond of him. With excellent timing the man bursts into mock tears.

Not soon after, Israeli secret police chased down and pulled over the filmmakers' cab.

They'd driven by Ariel Sharon's palace and the police had seen their camera. Since there are laws against filming the prime minister's accommodations, they were interrogated for an hour and a half.

None of their stories matched -- one said they were filmmakers, another, tourists. But the situation was pretty much par for the self-described "bumbling" nature of the filmmakers' recent 53-day trip across the Middle East.

Streaking back and forth across the region -- Turkey, Israel, Jordan, West Bank, back to southern Turkey -- which only Gordon had visited before, the filmmakers wanted to make a film that would capture the essence of the area's mood just before and during the Iraqi war.

They wanted Canadians to see what wasn't being shown on the news -- life at the street level, in the alleyways, in the dingy hotels, on the train -- and let people who had likely never been in front of the lens before speak their minds. Humour had to be a part of it.

"Actually we had no intentions of shooting Sharon's palace," says Frame, who has a theatre and improvisational comedy background. "We were more interested in this overweight cabdriver talking about his love life."

The Israelis who conducted the interrogation turned out to be relatively kind -- in contrast with the Turkish police who apprehended Frame later -- and were just interested in getting the real story for security reasons.

So when the story was finally ramrod straight, the secret police asked them why they hadn't just been up front in the first place.

"And then he said, 'We also have to tell you that you are the most disorganized journalists we've met in our lives,'" Frame recalled. "We were kind of proud of that, and I think it saved our asses many times throughout the trip, because we were just fumbling around."

The Akman's Allure

Big news syndicate journalists don't stay at the Akman Hotel. Or take the nine-dollar train.

But both were a staple for the three. Their room window at the Akman, a rusty old dented pot of a hotel in Ankara, Turkey, afforded a panoramic view of rubble and garbage. One night, they were filming the refuse, when some passerby screamed almost maniacally at them, "What are you doing? Don't film the garbage." He thought it a waste of film.

Then there was the nine-dollar, 26-hour train ride from Ankara to Diyarbakir, Turkey. They boarded it assuming there was a food car. There wasn't.

The fezzw times the train would shudder to a stop in small towns for only five minutes, the three would dash madly for the market, buy bread or whatever their eyes set on first, and hop back on as it rolled away.

All this was necessary. The trio had a budget of only $9,000.

The three -- who all work with Western Arctic Moving Pictures, a Yellowknifefilm cooperative that they were involved in starting -- had some ingenious ways of fetching capital. For instance, the sale of $100 bonds that entitle the holder to an executive producer credit raised $2,000.

But convincing people that they weren't "insane" in wanting to travel through the Middle East in the throes of war wasn't as straightforward as generating funds.

After all, the three had no foreign documentary experience, only experience doing quirky pieces like Dump Talk, a talk show set in the legendary Yellowknife dump, and pieces for CBC TV's show Zed, which airs short films and shows.

Their lack of news documentary experience may have scared their friends and family, but only Bowick had real reservations about travelling in the area and those washed away quickly.

"In the majority of places in Turkey I felt safer than I do in Canada," said Gordon, who'd travelled in the country before. "I didn't feel any tension. People were very friendly, they were just living their lives."

Gordon only once felt antsy when a large group of people, possibly containing an anti-American element, thronged Frame in the street while he conducted an interview.

"It definitely enlightened us," Gordon added. "There were these threats and yet people were just trying to live like any other people in any other country. You might be right next to a war zone and there may be the threat of suicide bombers but people are still getting on the bus, still going for a beer after work."

The challenge was to bring this stoicism across to Canadian viewers, not an easy task given the language barrier.

"We talked to so many people that it became more muddled," Gordon said.

"There is no Truth in the Middle East, we found. Everybody has a certain thing that they think is right, it's out there. They were more informed than most Canadians, we found, but nobody really knows what's going on. It's crazy."

Going crazy in monotone

On the 26-hour train ride, Frame went into the train washroom. There was a hole in the floor, crap girding it. The railroad tracks screamed by directly below.

Occasionally on the train, a man whose hair was greying and falling out would walk by. From talking with him before, they knew the man's job was to travel the train three times a week, selling tea. He would see his wife and five children for only four hours or so every three days.

"He'd say he was crazy because of the hours," Frame said. "We felt we were hurting because we hadn't slept in days and this guy's life was so much more difficult. Whenever I saw this guy walk by I'd feel like bursting out into tears."

Fumbling towards possible imprisonment

The Turkish government has a history of repressing the Kurds, and the filmmakers gathered footage of the Kurdish Democratic Party describing 30,000 killed in clashes between Turks and Kurdish guerrillas.

From a taxicab in Turkey, Frame filmed a Turkish flag whipping in the wind, while Gordon and Bowick sat in a cab with a translator and the driver.

Suddenly several members of the Turkish secret police entered the square of Frame's camera frame, their guns drawn.

Frame had been accidentally filming the airport, which was in the background behind the flag. The translator and driver were freaking out because Gordon had told them what was on the tape : the footage of the Kurdish Democratic Party head.

"If they see this we're screwed," the cab driver shouted. "You guys'll probably be all right. You're foreign press. But we'll be screwed."

Frame forgot to turn off the camera when he was being taken into the security building.

"I wasn't thinking and so I put the damn camera down and he's at his desk talking on the phone. And, of course, I'd gotten the whole conversation...So he's rewinding this, looking at me, thinking, 'Who is this guy? A spy? What the hell was he thinking?"

A translator was called. Frame was asked why he was filming the Turkish air base. Frame answered that it was a mistake. He would ask again, and Frame would answer the same. But, once again, they'd looked like bumbling journalists.

The tape was handed back to them and soon they were on their way.