Short of the Week: Stones in Hand by Mo’min Swaitat

This week, we thought we’d highlight this wonderfully engaging zero-budget short by Palestinian director Mo’min Swaitat free to watch on Youtube. Stones In Hand is an experimental docu-fiction based on the director’s experiences and memories of growing up in Jenin City in the West Bank.

It’s an interesting and rough collage of archive footage, uprisings, scenes in London, music, and lengthier recollections based on the cast’s own memories of the homes they left behind, all combined to encapsulate the experience of the Palestinian diaspora.

The film was produced by Foreign Body Productions as part of their Open Source Collaborations programme with the Albany Theatre in Deptford.

"In February 2020, I went to my hometown of Jenin, in the North of Palestine, for a brief visit, before being stuck in my family home for several months due to a COVID-19 lockdown. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on my early experiences, to continue sourcing the Arab vinyl and cassettes I have been collecting over the past few years and to look over family footage and photographs, considering how these sights and sounds shaped, and continue to shape, my life today, as an artist living and working in East London. Stones in Hand is a response to the strangeness of this time we are living through, the places we go to in our minds when we are unable to move around and the opportunities all this has afforded for self-reflection."

– Mo’min Swaitat, Writer and Director of ‘Stones in Hand’