If there is a cactus, it means there was a village there
Written by WANG Hong-Kai
On a scorching hot day in September 2019, I was waiting endlessly to get through Allenby Bridge/King Hussein, the most notoriously difficult checkpoint between Jordan and Israel, and the occupied West Bank i.e., Palestine. I almost failed the interview by obliviously telling the custom officer that my destinations were Jericho and Ramallah. “What Jericho and Ramallah?” She shouted at me. I should have known better. It was deadly obvious that in her mind these two cities should not exist. While I was on my way to Jericho with my Palestinian colleague May MAREI through the breathtaking landscape, I pondered, what kind of world am I entering into, and what/how am I going to see, to hear and to know, or not?
If a geographical locale is an epistemological framework, how does it mediate one’s subjectivity? How does one navigate one’s positionality within this framework, especially in relation to modes of knowing and not knowing? And how is one entangled and implicated therein, embodying varying degrees of proximity and distance? In “Notes on Free Palestine,” the filmmakers stage encounters in and through their films. Through their eyes and ears, we (the audience) come into contact with some sense of the complexity of their subjects in their irreducible materiality, in which subjects can be many things at once, much like the crises, struggles and histories that the artists carry with them and maybe so do we.
What does filming everyday landscapes reveal about the social and political structures of a given place at a given time? Inas HALABI’s We No Longer Prefer the Mountains asks. With that question in mind, we follow HALABI’s trajectory throughout the Druze’s (a Levantine religious minority) mountainous towns in Palestine, from forests, pomegranate orchards, streets, cemetery to the interviewees’ domestic spaces, as an isolated world shaped by control and coercion gradually unfolds.
In Jocelyne SAAB’s Palestinian Women, we listen to the testimonies given by the often-forgotten women refugees and fighters in the war between Palestine and Israel, as it captures the fragments of lived reality in the refugee camps and in the military training ground. “I don’t even know where and how I live. In between the sky and the planes, no one knows where the other is.” A woman sitting on the rubble by a rifle tells SAAB.
In Frontiers of Dreams and Fears, Mai MASRI patiently documents two Palestinian teenage girls’ growing friendship across the geographical barrier via letters between two refugee camps. The film transports us to the historical juncture during the liberation of southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation and at the beginning of the Palestinian Intifada (Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising). Amid joy, hope, dream and pain, we come to witness the way things have changed, people have (dis)connected with one another, and a village has been replaced by cacti.
It is difficult not to feel heartache about the way the voice messages between two friends, Zeina and Riham, in Zeina RAMADAN’s Sard reveal Riham’s desperate bid to leave Gaza—a place under siege for years. Her voice cracks and breaks. We root for Riham’s departure as we follow her movements through “this very sky is a cage” (Mahmoud DARWISH, 1987) until she is eventually elsewhere.
This paragraph “the sea is itself; it is also poetic measure. Poetic measure is itself; it is also the sea” (Ibrahim MUHAWI, 1987) comes to mind as we are drawn to the narrative of an anonymous group who invents a game of measurements in Basma AL-SHARIF’s We Began by Measuring Distance. Between Rome, Geneva, Madrid, Oslo, Sharm el Sheikh, Gaza and Jerusalem, from virgin forests to deep ocean, their innocent measurements gradually become political. Yet, how do image and sound fail or not fail to communicate history?
“When you take something apart, how in the world do you remember how it’s supposed to go back together?” Shuruq HARB asks in The White Elephant. It pulls us into the harsh yet sensuous world of a Palestinian teenager living in the occupied West Bank in the emergence of the internet during the 1990s. At that time, Saddam HUSSEIN lost the Gulf War, the Oslo Accord has been signed, Yasser ARAFAT was flying his helicopter from Gaza to Ramallah, trance music gatherings were popular in Israel. Amid all the contradictions, the film seems to beg the questions: how does one find one’s place? And if one does, what does it look like?
“Moonscape” not only stands for the surface of the moon as seen, but also is sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war. In either case, if there is a place far from the reach of colonialism, would it be the Moon? In Moonscape, Mona BENYAMIN, who lives under the Israeli occupation, interweaves ballad music, Lunar Embassy, film noir, NASA archival footage, canonic film references, and kinship into another world that might be different from where she is now.
In Electrical Gaza, Rosalind NASHASHIBI depicts Gaza as how she experienced it in the summer of 2014. A Palestinian flag is waving in the wind at the checkpoint. People are frolicking in the sea. The sound of Salah prayer is reverberating in the air. A young boy is playing in a small alley. And three men are singing “Yomma Mweil El-Hawa” at someone’s house, “…I’d rather be stabbed by dagger than live under the rule of a rogue…” All of these are suspended in the film shortly before the Gaza War broke out in 2014.
Noor ABED’s Our Songs Were Ready for All Wars to Come carries us with a song through a collage of different folktales from Palestine, asking: what do we know, or not know, about the history, the land, the people and the reality of Palestine? The film begins with a woman’s eerie voice sounding out in the darkness. Then a boy is playing in a pit. Bodies are lying in the rubble. They are crawling up the staircase. They are dancing. They are putting their heads in the water well. They are carrying a sack into a cave. They are singing. And they are lamenting.
“Notes on Free Palestine” brings together works by Palestinian and Arab women filmmakers, invoking the poem “Hamza” by Palestinian woman poet Fadwa TUQAN: “My sister, our land has a throbbing heart, it doesn't cease to beat, and it endures the unendurable. It keeps the secrets of hills and wombs. This land sprouting with spikes and palms is also the land that gives birth to a freedom-fighter. This land, my sister, is a woman.”
