with filmmaker Diana Allan
Chatila (2002, 44 mins) was shot in the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name, located in the suburbs of Beirut. It was produced collaboratively with a group of children living in the camp; many of the interviews and most of the shooting of everyday life in the camp was done by them. The film explores camp life through their eyes, and in particular focuses on the politicization of children and the impact that TV coverage of the Intifada is having on them and their families. As an ethnographic documentary, Chatila considers the cult of martyrdom in contemporary Palestinian political culture in the diaspora; the ways in which refugees outside articulate a sense of belonging to their homeland and how they relate to the current struggle taking place in the Occupied Territories. Another central theme is the way that memories of first generation refugees from 1948 are being transmitted to second and third generation Palestinians living in Lebanon—and the means by which a cultural heritage is being preserved in exile for a generation that has never seen Palestine.
It will be shown with Still Life (2007, 23 mins), a triptych of video portraits with three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon that explores the different ways in which memory is mediated. The first sequence considers how a series of photos belonging to Said, an elderly refugee in his eighties living in Sidon, now mediate his recollections of his life in Acre before 1948. It also reveals how the "reality" represented in these images has in fact become conflated with them. The second portrait follows Nabil, a Palestinian taxi driver who grew up in Tel'Azater—a camp in a Christian neighborhood of East Beirut that was destroyed during the civil war. For Nabil, remembering emerges cartographically —a spatial relationship with the past that is activated by movement through the city of Beirut. The final piece examines memory generated through ritual practice. Ali, a refugee born in Chatila, now in his late fifties, visits the border several times a month and spends hours videotaping Israeli checkpoints and his ancestral village of Khalsa, which is just visible from the observation deck at Fatima's gate. Ali now has an archive of over 100 hours of video shot during these visits. As opposed to the codification of memory in a finite set of photos (as we see in the case of Said), Ali's continually expanding collection constitutes a ritualized, mediated substitute for lived experience and the mnemonic processes associated with it.
As the ranks of first-generation Palestinian refugees continue to thin and hope of return appears increasingly remote, the symbolic value placed on 1948, as the key date in Palestinian history, continues to rise. This period has come to be known in Arabic as al-Nakba, literally “the catastrophe”. The Nakba Archive, a grassroots oral history collective in Lebanon, has recorded over 450 eyewitness testimonies that reconstruct, through personal memories, the social, cultural, and political life in Palestine prior to 1948 and the events that led to the expulsion. A series of excerpts from this collection will be screened as part of the program. Video projection.
Cosponsored with the Department of Anthropology, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Peace Studies Program.
color, total running time 1 hour 7 minutes, USA