PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL

In response to a growing interest in Palestinian art and culture, the Palestine Society at London’s School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) held their first Palestinian Film Festival in 1999. Six years on and the festival, now co-hosted by the Barbican, continues to grow in reputation and popularity. I went along to compare two documentaries concerned with the theme of origins, Not In My Garden and Out Of Place, Out Of Time.

The neighbourhood of Rabin Heights in Carmiel, Western Israel, tells a story that is very familiar to the country’s Palestinian populations. In 1976, all inhabitants of the village of Ramia were issued with eviction notices claiming the Israeli government needed to make way for Jewish immigrants to Carmiel, but the villagers refused to leave. Shiri Wilk’s film Not In My Garden chronicles the resistance of the Palestinian villagers of Ramia, and documents the phenomenon of “unrecognised villages” that dot the Israeli landscape.

By combining interviews with politicians and activists with simple nostalgic recollections from the villagers themselves, Wilk tell his story directly through its characters. At his most poignant, he successfully highlights the stark difference between the two societies by, in one instance, cutting between an Israeli Independence Day celebration and an ordinary day for the Palestinian villagers. The life they lived before the occupation was by no means an easy one- Ramia is a farming village in the largely dry area of Galilee- but Wilk seems to conclude that it was a life Palestinian families have been living for centuries, and that should be worth more than blind Israeli progress.

While the film is effective in evoking both the mental and political pressure the villagers are faced with, it suffers slightly from a lack of direction. With no central character to follow, and no plot as such, it comes across as more of a meditation on displaced Palestinians than a narrative documentary.

Out Of Place, Out Of Time, on the other hand, closely follows the lives of two central characters in Beirut’s Borj al Barajni Palestinian refugee camp to examine what a lifetime in exile will do to a people’s sense of identity. By turning his camera on Abu Hassan and Ahmed and allowing them to talk freely about their daily experiences, Stefan Markworth’s film becomes a powerful confession of the men’s dreams and fears. Once you can get passed Markworth’s voice-over - so patronising and monotonous the audience laughed openly– his film is an extremely well-balanced mix of facts, history and anecdote. At times outright funny, at other times disturbing, Out Of Place, Out Of Time is most revealing in its depiction of the pessimism and apathy that has gripped what is now Lebanon’s second Palestinian generation to grow up in exile.

Markworth’s film ends with two hilarious outtakes from his interviews; a needed break from the otherwise depressing monologues, and a good way to imply that- even in the worst situations- ordinary life goes on.

© Saeed Taji Farouky 2006

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