The refugee camp is innately a temporary home. But thousands of Palestinian refugees living in camps in Jordan, Lebanon or Syria since 1948 still languish in fenced-off precincts. For some, that little square kilometer locale is the past, the present and the future, the home and the world. Films screened at the recently concluded Abu Dhabi Film Festival clearly show how the Palestinian refugee question continues to haunt young filmmakers.
It’s a struggle to find anything beautiful here. But for Fleifel, who lived in Ain El-Halweh, then moved abroad with his family, and returned to shoot there, it feels like home. When he was young, his father was obsessed with the video camera, and he used it incessantly in the camp to document any and everything. The son now has access to this archival footage. His grandfather has been in the camp for sixty-four years. He still remembers his homeland. Little seems to have changed over the years, but there are markets and shops and electricity, and goods are available. Children play football in the alleys, or handle guns for sport. Once temporary, the camps are now cemented 2-storey buildings. But outside of this delimited territory, the world is alien, inaccessible. Trapped in the ghetto, Palestinians with no roots in Lebanon, are barred from working in most professions. They hang around, wait, wait, watch the World Cup, even as the old curse their “revolution’s failed leaders, the thieves, the corrupt.” The protagonist of the film, Fleifel’s friend Abu Eyad, remarks that there is “no work, no education, no future, no land to call their own.” Eyad moves from a carefree teenager to an angry, bitter, cynical adult. “This is a f…ed up country. They don’t deserve anything… not even your film.”An outstanding documentary from the Arab world and NETPAC award winner, A World Not Ours by Mahdi Fleifel, takes you into the claustrophobic bowels of the Ain El-Halweh refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. The film also won the Best Documentary Feature and the FIPRESCI Award—which it shared with an Egyptian film, Coming Forth By Day by Hala Lotfy. The camp in the film, set up sixty years ago,houses 70,000 refugees in a one square kilometer area.
Yet in a way, the camp has changed, as Fleifel discovers. Overcome by a certain listlessness, it is no longer the “Disneyland of his childhood, but a grey place for refugees.” Even the interest in football has waned.
Quirky and emotional, ‘normal’ yet not ‘normal’, emotional but not sentimental, personal yet universal, A World Not Ours shows the hardy world of the refugee, of his dreams that die all too quickly. How long can this go on? Fleifel wonders if his questions spoken out loud have made things worse. He quotes the words of Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister:“One day the old will die and the young will forget.” Is this what memory and homeland amount to?
Co-produced by Lebanon, UK and the UAE, the film was funded by Sanad, a generous development and post-production fund of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
“Our home is towards the sun, there where the sun sets every day.” Words of Palestinian refugees as they turn their faces westwards and gaze at their lost homeland in Annemarie Jacir’s When I Saw You (Palestine-Jordan-UAE). Jacir’s debut film, Salt of the Sea, had won the Special Jury Prize at Osian’s-Cinefan Film Festival in New Delhi in 2008.
It is 1967. Israeli forces have seized control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan and the much of the Golan Heights from Syria. Palestinians from the West Bank have fled to Jordan by bus or on foot. When the film opens, some refugees are living in the Harir refugee camp, among them 11- year-old Tarek and his mother. The father is missing.
Tarek (perceptively played by the young Mahmoud Asfa) is quiet, sensitive, intelligent, willful and a dreamer, on the cusp of awareness, yet too young to understand the complexities of politics. He longs for his father (accuses his mother of quarrelling with him, which is why he is missing, he says) and for his home (if we walked here, why can’t we walk back?). Yet he knows staunchly what he does not want: not for him the lackluster camp that reeks of humiliation and poverty; not for him the shabby school wherein competent instruction by teachers lulls kids to sleep (in any case Tarek is far smarter than the rest of his classmates, even if he can’t read); he wants to grow up, snap out of the protective embrace of his mother. Above all, he doesn’t understand what a refugee is, and refuses to be one.
He runs away, meets an old woman who tells him she has been waiting to return for twenty years. Tarek then makes up his mind. He must return home, home to Palestine. But the people he accidentally stumbles on are Palestinian freedom fighters—followers of Yasser Arafat—who are training and operating in the woods near Harir. This was a time when fedayeen camps were sprouting in Jordan. The fighters are amused that a kid wants to join them. “Is this a place for a boy?” they ask. “Are the camps any better?” Tarek retorts.
His worried mother looks for him, finds him and stays on with the fedayeen. But the boys escapes again when he realizes that for the fighters he is but a boy. After a mighty search he is found running towards the fence separating Jordan and the West Bank. The film ends—not with a crossing over—but with a warm reconciliation between the son and the mother as she finally understands what her son dreams of and is striving for.
Asfa and Ruby Blalas put in splendid, sensitive performances as the rebellious child and the strong though anxious mother. Jacir has chosen her spaces well for her story. The monotony of the camp she constructed for the film reinforces the feeling of despair in the protagonists. The dialogues are sharp and understated.
Jacir’s family is Palestinian. They became refugees in 1967, went to Saudi Arabia and then to Jordan. That’s when she felt like other Palestinians, observing Palestine from the outside. The film’s emotion contains the emotions she herself went through.But their refugee situation, she says, did something else: “We were frozen in time.”
“While 1948 (was) a reference point for all Palestinians because they lost their country, 1967 was personal moment for my family. We left the West Bank, and couldn’t go back. Either way, the Palestinians were caught. Those who remained inside faced military operations, those who left couldn’t return.”
Life in Saudi Arabia was “strange”. There was little to do, they had to be creative, and as children, they had to build their own little world. Later, in the US, when she worked for a literary agency, she received some ‘friendly’ advice: never mention Palestine or Palestinians!
When I Saw You was born of depression, says Jacir, who is known today as “one of the brightest stars of Arab cinema”. She was looking for hope after her first multiple-award-winning Salt of the Sea. And hope came by way of support from Sanad. “Sanad is a filmmaker’s dream. Historically, we have looked towards Europe for funding. Salt of the Sea had a range of international co-producers. This one is Arab funded. “Its eight investors are from this region.” When I Saw You has resonated with viewers in Sarajevo and particularly Cyprus, where people told her: “Change the language, and it could be a Cypriot film.” Winner of the Best Arab Film in the New Horizons section (first or second films of a director) at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, it is Palestine’s submission for the Oscars 2013.
by Latika Padgaonkar