Coming Home:
Palestinian Cinema
by
Annemarie Jacir
In the late 1960s, a group of young Arab women and men
devoted to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, chose to contribute to the
resistance through filmmaking – recording their lives, hopes, and their fight
for justice. Working in both fiction and documentary, they strived to tell the
stories of Palestine and to create a new kind of cinema.
These filmmakers included founders Mustafa Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah, and Hani
Jawhariya. Others were Khadija Abu Ali, Ismael Shammout, Rafiq Hijjar, Nabiha
Lutfi, Fuad Zentut, Jean Chamoun and Samir Nimr. Most were refugees, exiled
from their homes in Palestine. And others were fellow Arabs who stood in
solidarity with them, devoting their work to a just cause. Their films screened
across the Arab world and internationally but never in Palestine. None of the
filmmakers were allowed into Palestine, or what became known as Israel, let
alone their celluloid prints.
And more than thirty years later, their films had still never been screened in
Palestine. As artistic director of the Dreams of a Nation film festival
in Palestine in 2003, I knew it was both appropriate and essential to try to
open the festival with these films in the heart of Palestine – Jerusalem - to
honor the work of these brave filmmakers.
I had been searching for the original films and filmmakers for several years,
and had finally managed to locate Kais Al-Zubaidi in 2000, who was part for of
the group of filmmakers, and now lives in Berlin. We screened his film
“Palestine, A People’s Record” (1984) in the first Palestinian film festival in
New York. Al-Zubaidi is also an editor, cameraman, and researcher dedicated to
Palestinian cinema.
In 1982, the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon and the Palestinian film archives
disappeared, along with the rest of the PLO’s cultural heritage collections.
Al-Zubaidi had actively searched for the lost film for many years and managed
to locate a few – of which he now maintains in an archive in Berlin. The
archive of Palestinian film in Beirut “went missing in 1982. Some say it was
destroyed, others that the films were taken by the Israeli army and may still
be in existence," he says. Al-Zubaidi generously supplied the films to us
for the premiere screening in Palestine.
The two films I chose to screen were “Return to Haifa” (1981) by Kassem Hawal
and “They Don’t Exist” (1974) by Mustafa Abu Ali. Both are central to the
history of our cinema.
Based on Ghassan Kanafani’s novel and funded entirely with Palestinian money
(collected by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the film
“Return to Haifa” is often cited as “the first Palestinian fiction film”,
despite the fact that the director is not actually Palestinian. In the North of
Lebanon, the Palestinians living in the refugee camps provided “the capital,
aid and enthusiasm” for the film project. Three months before beginning the
filming in the Tripoli region, the production team launched a wide awareness
campaign in the camps of Nahr el Bared and Al Bedawi. Meetings were held in
squares, workplaces, and even in the mosques after Friday prayers. For the
exodus scene alone, which opens the film, they had 3,000 to 4,000 extras of all
ages, hundreds of items of period dress (Palestinians from the camps brought
out their old clothes), old cars, and dozens of fishing boats (Lebanese
fishermen lent their boats for the day). On the morning of August 23,1981, all
this was ready, and “as if by a miracle the film set on the port of Tripoli
came to resemble that of Haifa in 1948”.
The second film was directed by Mustafa Abu Ali in 1974, who took his title
from the remark made by Golda Meir that the Palestinians do not exist. Abu Ali,
one of the first Palestinian filmmakers and founder of the PLO’s film division,
began making films in 1968 in Jordan, along with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani
Jawhariya. After Black September, Abu Ali and the others had to leave Jordan
but continued making resistance films in Lebanon.
Abu Ali was able to return to Palestine after the signing of the Oslo Accords,
following 47 years of exile as a refugee. However he is forbidden by Israeli
law to live in, or even visit, his hometown of Maliha (in the Jerusalem
district) and must live in Ramallah – only 15 kilometers away. Maliha was
attacked in July of 1948 and partially demolished by the Zionist forces. All
the inhabitants, including Abu Ali, were ethnically cleansed and became
refugees never allowed to return to their homes. Today, most Israelis know the
area only as the Malcha Shopping Mall or Kenion.
Abu Ali’s contribution to Palestinian cinema is significant, as well as his
contribution to international cinema. He worked with Jean-Luc Godard, who
always said his soul is Palestinian, on the acclaimed film “Ici et Ailleurs”.
Godard is “a great filmmaker; dedicated, creative and imagnitatve. We were both
concerned to find the right film language appropriate to the struggle for
freedom,” says Abu Ali.
Naturally, I wanted Abu Ali to be present at the premiere of his film screening
in Jerusalem. We applied for a permit from the Israeli Authorities in order for
them to allow Mustafa to travel the 15 km's to Jerusalem. The permit was
rejected. We tried again, and were denied once again.
We decided to bring him anyway.
Several cars were arranged in order to pick him up and drop him off at various
checkpoints; cars to meet him on one side in order to bring him to the next
checkpoint. I asked a foreign journalist- a friend who lives in Ramallah - to
accompany Abu Ali along the journey – not just to keep him company but also to
ensure his safety from the Israeli Army (as much as his safety could be
ensured). Inevitably, problems arose which led to delays. A journey that
once took 20 minutes, now takes several hours. Together Abu Ali and the journalist
crossed the barriers, walked through fields, up hills, and eventually made it
to Jerusalem. At one point Abu Ali, grasping for breath said, “We used to say
‘art for the struggle’, now it’s ‘struggle for the art’.”
As the audience and organizers nervously waited in Jerusalem, a Sight and Sound
journalist reported, “documentary-maker Abu Ali Mustafa, meanwhile, was
stranded on the other side on the way to an opening-night screening of his 1974
work They Don't Exist in a makeshift cinema at the YMCA in East Jerusalem.” We
were screening his film in a theater we had built ourselves at the YMCA, as the
Israeli Authorities forced Palestinian movie theaters to shut during the 1st
intifada in the 1980s.
An exhausted but glowing Mustafa Abu Ali finally showed up in Jerusalem to
attend the Opening Night. They Don’t Exist screened for the first time in
Palestine to a packed house, and Abu Ali watched his own film for the first
time in twenty years. For him, it was a moment of reflection upon “that period
in the 70s when I was trying to develop a new language for militant cinema.”
Seeing the films in Jerusalem was something he “never thought could happen.”
Mustafa Abu Ali, now sixty-three years old, had entered his own city, illegally
but with pride. As for Kassem Hawal, like so many others, he cannot enter
Palestine, but his film did – a film that chronicles a return to a city in a
country that was once open, based on a book by an exiled Palestinian writer who
was never allowed to return home. The significance of watching Return to Haifa
was not lost on the Jerusalem audience – in a city where our books had been
banned, our theaters closed, and still chocking under military occupation, the
mood in the theater that night was extraordinary More than thirty years after their
production, we managed to publicly screen two of the most important films of
the Palestinian resistance cinema for the first time in Palestine – the films
had finally come home.
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"Nothing much is happening in Beirut, we go on from day to day looking
forward to that moment when we can come and go to our homeland without any
restrictions or special permission. Regards to all in Bethlehem. Yours,
Edward"
- June 12th, 1968 (letter from my uncle to our family)
Annemarie Jacir
www.philistinefilms.org