A much appreciated chance to view new films from and about Palestine emerged at the Rotterdam International Film Festival this year. The films come from three sections: RTM, Harbour, and Short & Mid-length. All address the history and reality of Palestinians since 1948, whether this reality is in an Israeli prison, a village stranded behind a separation wall, a refugee camp in Lebanon, or a heavily surveilled neighbourhood in Jerusalem.
These films can be relevant in understanding the rather ‘complicated’ Arab-Israeli conflict. Through the striking visuals and cinematography in Giovanni C. Lorusso’s Song of All Ends, the powerfully ethical research and editing in Kamal Aljafari’s UNDR, a personal-public ode to friendship in Yvann Yagchi’s Avant, il n’y avait rien, and a poetic and absurdist political commentary on hunger in Diana Al-Halabi’s The Battle of the Empty Stomachs, the films offer the audience a chance to see that the struggle and misery of Palestinians did not begin on the 7th of October 2023, but may well continue and escalate unless peace, accountability, and co-existence prevail.
The backlash and overkill by Israeli forces that followed the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas militants has left over 27,000 dead and more than 2.3 million people on the fringe of death from starvation and cold in Gaza, trapped between the Egyptian border and Israeli bombardments in the north and south of the now-shattered and torn Gaza Strip.
Diana Al-Halabi, a Lebanese artist and filmmaker based in Rotterdam, dedicates The Battle of the Empty Stomachs to residents of the Gaza Strip facing bombardment by Israeli forces. She positions herself from the start in an Arabic monologue. “I once knew fasting. The kind my mother told me about….to sympathize with the poor”; the fasting that most people who grew up in religious Muslim families know. What about hunger strikers and starving refugees?
Funded by the RTM Pitch Prize at IFFR 2023, the mid-length film is divided into different sections. Basing her story on real accounts by former Palestinian prisoners who went on strike, Al-Halabi poetically compares a prisoner in an Israeli detention center, who consciously goes on a hunger strike to demand basic rights, with a displaced refugee who is desperately trying to fetch anything edible. Al-Halabi’s bold film questions the mundane representations of hunger, and shows how it can be used as a tool of resistance. She positions two characters on either end of a playground seesaw, with a tall table in between them. Standing in the middle is a woman IDF soldier who takes trays of food and salt from the displaced refugee and tries to force it on the prisoner. When the latter refuses it, she places it in a location in a table where the former can see it but cannot reach it.
Out of the four, Avant, il n’y avait rien is by far the most calm and personal. Swiss-Palestinian director Yvann Yagchi shows in this beautiful ode to friendship how much he regrets its end, but at the same time how he feels no guilt that it ended. He follows his childhood and teenage best friend, who opted to move from Switzerland and live in an Israeli settlement built on Palestinian lands. The documentary begins as their mutual project.
Yagchi travels to the settlement, trying to understand its reality, while his hidden agenda is to piece together what is left of their friendship. He meets his friend’s children, wife, neighbours, even his rabbi, and attends Passover celebrations. But his Palestinian origin is targeted by the exclusivity and discriminatory rhetoric in the settlements, words which are especially painful coming from his best friend.
When the end of the friendship comes, it changes the course of the whole documentary.
The friend decides to withdraw from the project and threatens to sue. Yagchi defiantly decides to continue the film alone with even more determination, not to seek reconciliation, but to explore his own anger. He takes his camera and digs deeper into the history of his family, who were displaced in the 1948 Nakba. So he interviews his mother, visits East Jerusalem and the separation wall, and holds imaginary conversations with his great-grandfather, while staying in an Israeli-owned motel which used to be his office before the establishment of Israel.
Avant, il n’y avait rien shows the reality of the settlements in current times, close to suburban neighborhoods and with all amenities, contrasting them to the poverty of Palestinian villages. However, in Kamal Aljafari’s 15-minute short UNDR, the film problematizes the establishment of settlements. Aljafari’s filmography begins in 2003 when he started using documentary and archival footage to reestablish the histories of places that are no longer there, except in memory.
In UNDR, only archival footage is used, mostly from helicopter vantage points (implying surveillance and absolute control) on archaeological sites, now construction sites, of what used to be Palestinian villages. Nearby, caught between Israel and Palestine, are villagers and Bedouins still living in a primitive way. Footage shows controlled yet massive explosions set off by construction experts, to make way for crews who will build newer settlements that are artificially greener and more modern. There is no dialogue, no interviews, only footage likely taken by a construction company or a government agency to document the building process. But within this lies a harsh condemnation.
The only feature film on the list is Giovanni C. Lorusso’s Song of All Ends, which tells the story of the Alhaddad family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, 16 months after the city’s deadly port explosion. Neither Shatila nor the family are new to crises. Along with the Sabra camp, Shatila witnessed one of the deadliest massacres in the Lebanese civil war in 1982, killing hundreds — possibly thousands — of civilians. Shot in black and white, Song of All Ends portrays the suspended life of a family attempting to heal after learning of their daughter’s death in the 2020 explosion. A slow-burn plot reveals how this trauma is reflected in the family’s everyday interactions, but also in the surrounding community. Filmed in the Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian residential communities of the Shatila Camp, the film’s grim yet elegant cinematography uses closeups and steadicam footage to capture the residents’ bored and hopeless faces.
Although historically IFFR has been never shied away from promoting Palestinian cinema and its voices of peace and co-existence, this year the festival deserves kudos for bravely programming these four films (and keeping them in the selection) at a time when Europe is tempted to ban and silence peaceful and secular pro-Palestinian voices, whether they are European, Jewish, queer, from the Middle East or immigrant backgrounds.
Having these films screening in Europe is essential, not necessarily to advocate for the Palestinian cause, but to allow Palestinians and Israelis to regard each other as humans.
