Palestine in Focus

For almost two years, we have been receiving daily images of ethnic cleansing, enabled and supported by a large number of governments and mass media. In the face of horror: silence, justification, denial, inaction, repression. Imperialist, racist, and anti-Muslim views, which hierarchise lives and permeate Western politics, have built up global consent to the massacres. This consent is the result of 77 years of a continuous Nakba, during which Zionist power has focused on erasing Palestinian culture in order to impose its founding narrative and legitimise its occupation.

Despite its archives being looted during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, Palestinian cinema has continued to preserve the history of its people’s resistance since the 1960s and to convey counter-narratives, which are essential in the fight against a system that controls both the facts and their interpretation. This selection of shorts, screened in Paris and Marseille by the Ciné-Palestine Festival throughout its 11 years of existence, aims to show the diversity of these narratives and their forms. It recentres the memory and imagination of a people that refuse to become an archive, to be trapped in certain representations, to give up on dreaming.

The first programme will open the festival with a filmic gesture of internationalist solidarity, part of Some Strings, a project that brings together works by artists from around the world in response to a text by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, killed in a bombing in December 2023. 

Echoing FEKK’s slogan, this programme keeps the inextinguishable flame of return burning. Although inscribed in a to-this-day violated UN resolution, the right to return seems only briefly palpable for internally displaced Palestinians from Galilee. They are cynically allowed by the Israeli government to go back to their devastated villages once a year, on the anniversary of the creation of Israel. Michel Khleifi films one such day in Ma’loul celebrates its destruction (1985); a picnic among the trees planted on the ruins of Palestinian homes to commemorate the victims of Nazism. Kids play and an old man searches for traces of the past. The wound is still open, but in life and remembrance, resistance takes shape. Also subverting the borders set by the occupier, Razan AlSalah imagines their grandmother’s return to Haifa via Google Street View. Through superimposition and glitch, Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2017) stages a reconstruction of memory and grapples with an interface that normalises erasure while nurturing an illusory sense of universal access to the land. Finally, the return as a bonding collective narrative drives Ours Is a Country of Words (2017), directed by Belgian filmmaker Mathijs Poppe in collaboration with Palestinian actor Jamal Hindawi, his family and other inhabitants of Beirut’s Shatila refugee camp. In intimate spaces, they prepare to leave and discuss their hopes and plans. Their speech and imagination defy the actual walls and powers hindering their lives.

The second programme, presented in partnership with Grounded, gathers four films that fight imposed fragmentation and expand the narratives. In The Arab Dream (1998), Elia Suleiman wanders occupied Jerusalem, questioning the possibility of creation and dreams in such a place of injustice. A polyphonic reaction starts to emerge from his body and the bodies of the friends he invites on his quest. Then, in Jumana Manna’s A Sketch of Manners (2013), bodies of loved ones give life to a forgotten archive. The film transposes an event photographed in 1924 into 1942, freeing collective memory from hegemonic frames and opening critical ways of appropriating the past, understanding the present, and looking to the future. Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s In Vitro (2019) pursues this reflection on time, using post-apocalyptic sci-fi to criticise the political and narrative systems that try to confine Palestinian identities, recalling how limitless these are. Closing the programme, Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) pays tribute to the image-makers who bear witness to the reality of Gaza through dense editing and collage. Today’s social media meet yesterday’s militant cinema, while a voice invokes Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel. The directors ask him, us and themselves: what is our responsibility to these images, to Gaza, to Palestine?

This selection doesn’t pretend to provide an answer, but it affirms one thing: Palestinian stories do exist and it is our duty to listen to them, spread them and amplify them. The Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination must also be ours. We must act to keep this dream burning.

Mathilde Guitton-Marcon, for Ciné-Palestine Festival