Norma Marcos is a French critic, filmmaker and journalist of Palestinian origins. She lives in Paris but was born in the Palestine territories, where she frequently works. While traveling to Palestine to begin production on a new film project, Marcos was denied entry into Israel through Ben-Gurion Airport and detained by Israeli authorities. She was held in a jail and later under house arrest in Bethlehem, her home town. Marcos insisted that the charges against her were false and she ended up spending seven weeks trapped in Bethlehem waiting for her case to be sorted out. Marcos began filming her new surroundings with a mini-DV camera, and shooting interviews with one of her occasional visitors, her seven-year-old niece, Yara.

I shot Waiting for Ben-Gurion spontaneously during a time when I was put in prison at Ben-Gurion airport in Israel. While everyone was telling me to give up resisting the Israeli authorities due to the hopelessness of the situation, I decided to psychologically resist the illegal treatment that I was facing as a French citizen of Palestinian origins, by choosing to remain aware of the relativity of both internal and external limitation.

Marcos fashioned her DV footage into this documentary film, Waiting for Ben-Gurion, which blends her jailbird's eye view of Jerusalem with a child's perspective on life in the Middle East.