Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

CINEMA OF PALESTINIAN RETURN

May 3 – May 18

The experiences of Palestine and Palestinians, of dispossession, erasure, and annihilation, have their counterparts in steadfastness, insistence, and resistance. These forces crystallize in the unrelenting Palestinian political demand for a return to their lands. While threatening to upend a world imperial system and its constellation of Zionist settlement, the structures of this return are in fact highly practical: systems of organization, refusal, and care; networks of ideology and commitment; and a determination to think beyond the confines of current political possibility, to envision a Palestine at once restored and remade.

This spring, Anthology presents the series, “Cinema of Palestinian Return,” which traces the project of a collective cinema, showcasing a number of early fiction films spanning the primary geographies of Palestinian exile. This represents a deliberate formal choice: Palestinian filmmaking in the days of revolution was often determined by the political demands and material limitations of the period, which left early filmmakers constrained by the documentary mode. Reflecting on these tendencies, Jean-Luc Godard noted that after the nakba of 1947-49, “the Jews became the stuff of fiction, the Palestinians, of documentary,” which indeed bespoke the emphasis on testimony and the chronicling of events in the work of militant Palestinian cinema.

Nevertheless, revolutionary Palestinian filmmakers and their comrades from across the Arab world made rare and valiant contributions to narrative cinema beginning in the 1970s. Some directors adapted novels to narrate Palestine; others devised scenarios based on their personal and filial involvement fighting for the cause; while some creatively experimented with found footage to recreate and recollect places made inaccessible by Zionist encroachment. Although film sets and their attendant possibilities of cinematic form in historic Palestine remained largely foreclosed until the late 1980s, several efforts at feature filmmaking were taken up by politically-committed directors in neighboring nations and locales. Among them, Borhane Alaouié’s KAFR QASIM (1975), which staged southern Syria as occupied Palestine to portray the lead-up to the eponymous 1956 massacre; Kassem Hawal’s RETURN TO HAIFA (1982), in which Palestinians from the Nahr al-Barid and Badawi refugee camps re-enacted the forced displacement of 1948 using the Lebanese port of Tripoli as their stand-in; and Khaled Hamada’s THE KNIFE (1972), which, while filmed in Syria, was scripted from Ghassan Kanafani’s “All That’s Left To You” (1966), a novella set in Gaza.

The structure of the screenings will parallel these trajectories and histories, with each afternoon or evening representing a specific geography of Palestinian life, to be accompanied by panels or teach-ins. The result is a survey of some of Arab cinema’s pioneers, including Qais al-Zubaidi (Iraq, Syria), Mohammad Malas (Syria), Christian Ghazi (Lebanon), Mustafa Abu Ali and Vladimir Tamari (Palestine), and Yousry Nasrallah (Egypt). The diversity of the works testifies to the desire to transcend documentary tactics, towards an ambitious, imaginative, and politically subversive project of narrative fiction.

The month of May marks the 76th year of the nakba, a commemoration soaked in the blood of Gaza, whose people have faced relentless massacre and dispossession by Western and Zionist forces. Preserving, circulating, and politically engaging with the cultural production of the Palestinian struggle is a minimum demand. The films that emerged from this struggle are tethered to the dreams of the Palestinian people, who despite setback and catastrophe continue to assert their right to return to their homeland.

“Cinema of Palestinian Return” is guest-programmed by Kaleem Hawa and Nadine Fattaleh, who wrote the introduction above.

Special thanks to Naja Al Achkar (Nadi Lekol Nas); Daoud Alaouié; Kamal Aljafari; Sébastien Fouque (Pyramide International); Khadijah Habashneh; Zeina Hanna; Kassem Hawal; Flavia Mazzarino; Irit Neidhardt (mec film); Palestine Film Institute; the Tamari family; and Mohanad Yaqubi.

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