Reclaiming Palestine, one film at a time.(Report)

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In Waiting, the 2005 feature film by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, the main character, Ahmad, is assigned an important mission: travel to refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon to seek out every possible Palestinian actor for a new European Union-funded Palestinian theater in Gaza. Having just buried his father, he is eager to get out of the Occupied Territories, and is reluctant to accept this task. Standing amidst the construction site, the director enthusiastically enumerates for Ahmad the many facilities the theater will contain--elevators, a 2,000-person seating capacity, full parking--and the many dignitaries due to attend (Arafat, Castro, and Mandela). "How can you have a nation without a national theater?," he tells Ahmad. "How can you have a national theater without a nation?," Ahmad defiantly replies.

In the real world, there is no such thing as a Palestinian National Theater in Gaza, and yet this statement aptly befits the paradox underlying the artistic medium from which it was borne: "Palestinian Cinema." As critic Hamid Naficy points out in his essay in Dreams of A Nation, one of many books recently published on Palestinian films, "Palestinian cinema is one of the rare cinemas in the world that is structurally exilic, as it is made either in the condition of internal exile in an occupied Palestine or under the erasure and tensions of displacement and external exile in other countries." Its existence, given the circumstances, is in itself remarkable. There is no national funding, few skilled crews, filmmakers have to work around curfews and roadblocks, cannot always access their locations and often have to shoot on the hit-and-run. In his introduction to this book, which he edited, Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi, who in 2003 organized a Palestinian film festival at his university by the same name, declares Palestinian cinema a "stateless cinema of the most serious national consequences." According to him the contradictory nature of Palestinian cinema "gives it a unique and exceptionally unsettling disposition." The diversity and disparity of the cinematic approach among its filmmakers further complicates the terminology of "Palestinian cinema." What binds Palestinian films together are the language--Palestinian Arabic-the subject--Palestinian lives--and the desire of each director to portray his own take on what being Palestinian means.

More than any of its contemporaries, Palestinian cinema, which only began to appear in the 1980s, is an act of resistance: a kind of "I-film-therefore-I-am," or even, "I-film-therefore-you-dear-fellow-Palestinian-are." It is first and foremost a reclamation of an obliterated identity. Many of the contributors to Dreams, which is constructed as a series of essays and is an engrossing record of Palestinian cinema, covering its history, its development, and its past and current challenges, insist that Israel has systematically tried to prevent the emergence of Palestinian culture. In her entry, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, who curated the 2003 Columbia festival, sums up the importance of her work and that of her fellow contemporary directors by saying, "With cameras, we tell our own stories, represent our experiences, and resist being made invisible." In the same book, Michel Khleifi, whose Fertile Memory (1980) and Wedding in Galilee (1987) heralded contemporary Palestinian cinema, writes, "Whether we [Palestinians] live in Palestine or in the Diaspora, we have come to understand how we have been made invisible"-that word again--"through the complete absence of our own voices and images."

AS Khleifi's brother George and his coauthor Nurith Gertz point out in their concise and masterfully written Palestinian Cinema, Palestinians were complicitly silent during the first half of the twentieth century by not appreciating--or understanding--the potential of film as a counternarrative. Even though a few films-almost all documentaries--were made between the 1930s and 1950s (the authors diligently track down and interview individuals who worked on some of the early films), Palestinian cinema really began to take form only in the late 1960s, when Palestinian political organizations realized that (documentary) film could be a powerful vehicle to advance their cause and to influence public opinion in the West. This period, which Gertz and Khleifi term the Third Period, got its start with the Arab defeat in the 1967 War, "the most traumatic event in the modern history of the Arab people," Gertz and Khleifi write. But it's an earlier trauma, known to the Arabs as the Nakba, the seminal events of 1948 during which an untold number of Palestinians were forced out from their homes and lands, and which had almost entirely muted Palestinian cinema for two decades, that would remain the focus of the films produced by the political organizations. "The central trauma of Palestine, the Nakba, is the defining moment of Palestinian cinema," writes Hamid Dabashi, "and it is around that remembrance of the lost homeland that Palestinian filmmakers have articulated their aesthetic cosmovision."

Gertz and Khleifi maintain that, as is often the case with traumatic experiences, it took a long time for the Palestinians to rebound, but because the violence continues, as if history is repeating itself, they are unable to entirely overcome those experiences. "Since the lost object lives in the consciousness as if it still exists and because past events emerge in the present as if ...