Fast, furious, female: Meet the all-women Palestinian racing team bringing the speed to the IFI docfest

With a swagger that might make Conor McGregor blush, the Bethlehem-raised racer Betty Saadeh (35) swings out of a modified car and back into her heels: "I'm beautiful and attractive," she says later. "I'm media savvy. I'm a brand."

The half-Latina Saadeh is one of the Speed Sisters, an all-female Palestinian racing team who compete on the West Bank's professional car-racing circuit. She's one of five women followed in a new documentary, also called Speed Sisters, by the film-maker Amber Fares.

The others include Mona Ali (29), from Ramallah, one of the first female racers in Palestine; Marah Zahalka (23), who was crowned champion at a precocious 19; Noor Dauod (25), from Jerusalem, a driver who is as unlikely to medal as she is to give up; and team manager Maysoon Jayyusi (38), who was inspired to take up racing as a corrective to many frustrating hours spent at West Bank checkpoints.

The logistics are nightmarish: the races are held at makeshift tracks around vegetable markets, their training ground is a pen overlooking an Israeli detention centre, and then there’s the issue of permits: some of the women have never seen the sea. At one point in the film, Saadeh is hit by a tear gas canister.

Occupation

“The ID you have determines a lot,” says Amber Fares. “It’s not necessarily determined by how much money you have. It’s more to do with where your family is from.

“A Jerusalem ID will get you much further than a West Bank ID. It’s a really hard thing to explain. But at the end of the day they live under occupation. So many of your decisions when you’re living there are determined by occupation.”

In 2001, the Canadian-born Fares had a career in marketing and an MBA from the University of Calgary. Then the attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre sent her off on a road less travelled.

“I grew up in Canada. My parents were born in Canada. But my grandparents were Lebanese. After 9/11 things really shifted in Canada, as they did all around the world, and there was a backlash against our family, even though, at that point we were living in Canada for 80 or 90 years. That awakened an interest in my Arab heritage and also a desire to show stories from Arab communities.”

Having relocated to the West Bank, Fares has subsequently worked as a videographer for the United Nations, Defence for Children International, and the British Consulate.

“We were introduced to the story the same time as the British Consulate, who went on to fund one of the races,” says Fares. “One of the women who was not in the film, who was one of the first women involved in driving in Palestine, was a driver for the UN, and that’s how I got to know her. And I immediately thought there’s a greater story here.”

While always fun to watch, there's a Gordian knot of gender politics at the heart of Speed Sisters. The wildly talented Marah Zahalka, for example, counts her dad among her biggest fans. Her immediate family delays buying a house in order to fund her career, yet her grandfather isn't nearly so keen.

In a film that is not short of thrills, perhaps the biggest thrill is the realisation that these women have support from their community.

Active

“When people think of Palestine, they don’t normally equate it with race-car driving, let alone women race-car drivers,” says Fares. “But Palestine isn’t Saudi Arabia. The Middle East isn’t a homogeneous society.

“Women are active in the resistance movement in the West Bank. It’s not unreasonable to have women racing in Palestine or having lives in sport. These women race because they love the sport. They don’t do it to be pushed out of their community. They’re part of their society.”

Speed Sisters is screening Friday at 8.30pm as part of the IFI Documentary Festival, which ends on Sunday, September 27th