myDylarama

Of The People, For the People: Militant Palestinian Cinema (1968-1982)

Asma Ibrahim — 2024-05-13T18:31:19Z

The screening programme Of The People, For the People: Militant Palestinian Cinema (1968-1982) was held as part of Doc City Festival. It was curated by filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky.

Before attending Of The People, For the People, my main exposure to early Palestinian cinema was via R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity which I saw at the Institute of Contemporary Arts some months ago. This was a very different experience. After a strong opening statement by Saeed Taji Farouky, we were guided through his curated selection of five films made in the 1970s:

Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973)
The Visit (Qais Al-Zubaidi, 1970)
Palestinian Women (Jocelyne Saab, 1973)
Our Small Houses (Kassem Hawal, 1974)
They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974)

The first film, Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza, was familiar to my eyes. Made by Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, it is a fantastic example of how a completely different tale can be told with the same content. Mustafa Abu Ali repurposed footage meant for a French documentary on Palestine, instead weaving a tale about Palestinian resilience in the face of occupation. It is a timely film, confronting the audience with an occupied Gaza of decades past. We hear about Khan Younis and Rafah , names that are now as familiar as our local neighbourhoods. The film repeatedly uses the word ‘fedayeen', which means resistance fighter in Arabic. Strangely enough, I find myself thinking of Dune Part Two - which I had watched two days prior. Frank Herbert's heavy lifting from Arabic included fedayeen (in Dune ‘fedaykin') to refer to the Fremen, who used similar guerilla tactics against their enemies - the Harkonnens.

Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza is followed by The Visit by Qais Al-Zubaidi, an experimental nine-minute short film. The Visit is a collage-style film featuring poetry from prominent Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darweish, Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Ziad. In the darkness of a cinema, the eerie scenes and poetry readings are particularly impressive.

One of my favourite films from the selection was Palestinian Women (Jocelyne Saab, 1973). Initially commissioned by Antenne 2, a French TV channel, it was then stuck in the editing process and never aired. The opening scene is set in a kindergarten classroom, we are told that the women accompanying the children aren't ordinary women but guerrilla fighters. Soon we are watching interviews with female Palestinian students in Beirut. I was particularly struck by one interviewee who talked about female emancipation as being part of their struggle for liberation. Her goal was not to return to what was but to create a better future for her people in every way possible. I also suspected the following line may be why the film was shelved: “It is not just Israel who is at war with us, but also the United States and France, and all the other countries… The coward ones fight with their aviation. The brave ones fight, setting foot to free their land.” This statement is articulated by a fierce woman seated on the ground, a gun at her side.

The fourth film, Our Small Houses is less well-known but an interesting work of cinema. It is a PFLP creation by Iraqi director Kassem Hewel. It is a black-and-white montage film that ends with dramatic extended first person POV shots of a rifle, these emphasise the notion of the camera as a weapon, but also invite the viewer to join the movement and ‘shoot'.

We finish with They Do Not Exist, another Mustafa Abu Ali short film. The story of the film itself is remarkable. Salvaged from a wrecked Beirut in 1982, it was restored, smuggled in and finally screened in Jerusalem, Palestine in 2003. Seeing his film for the first time in around twenty years, Mustafa Abu Ali said “We used to say ‘art for the struggle', but now it's ‘struggle for the art'.” The title is a reference to Golda Meir's remark that Palestinians do not exist. It is a powerful film that merits a rewatch. I was particularly touched by the sincerity of Aida, a ten year-old girl in the Nabatieh refugee camp, who narrates a letter she writes to revolutionary fighters. She laments that the best gift she can offer is a towel, but expresses her admiration for the fighters and praises their courage.

The Q&A that follows features Professor Lina Khatib from the SOAS Middle East Institute, and Dr Nadia Yaqub from the University of North Carolina. One of the most memorable points was on the creation and destruction of archives. While the Israeli occupation has regularly engaged in cultural and historical erasure, through the destruction of institutions, libraries and other formal archives, Dr Nadia Yaqub emphasised that we should not only frame this situation in such a way that Palestinians are passive victims. Instead, it is important to remember that Palestinians actively respond to these acts of erasure by reconstructing archives and making entirely new ones. After all, the point behind historical and cultural erasure is for the Israeli regime to destroy any sense of peoplehood amongst the indigenous Palestinians. To be truly acknowledged as a people would be to acknowledge their claim to the land.

The selected films are diverse in style, content and direction but all portray Palestinians as active revolutionaries resisting imperialism, rather than helpless victims. These films mark a determination by Palestinians to control their own image and narrative. Screened across film festivals across the globe, they indicate not just the breadth of cinema on Palestine, but also how international the Palestinian cause truly is. Of The People, For the People is a fitting tribute to Palestinian filmmaking of the past and a strong reminder that while the camera can be a ‘weapon for imperialism', it is also a weapon for resistance.

"It offered solace and an outlet in its silent form of rebellion" - Exploring Nüshu in Hidden Letters

Asma Ibrahim — 2023-09-29T12:17:18Z

Violet Du Feng's film tells the story of two Chinese women trying to balance their lives as independent women in modern China while confronting the traditional identity that defines but also oppresses them.

Nüshu (女书), literally ‘women script', is described as a secret language developed by women in Jiangyong Prefecture in China to communicate with each other. At one point as an undergraduate, I came across Nüshu while reading on the intersection between gender and literature in East Asia. The story of a language created as an act of rebellion against a society that treated them poorly drew me in, but I didn't come across it again until Hidden Letters.

Violet Feng's Hidden Letters is a documentary that focuses on the modern manifestation of Nüshu and its treatment as a commodity. In doing so, it unwittingly reveals and comments on the challenges women face in modern day China.

Nowadays, Nüshu is a hobby, a commodity, and a performance. It is a remnant of history that has been preserved but in a way that was utterly unforeseen by its creators and participants. What was once a private form of communication subtly appearing on handkerchiefs and fans, domestic items easily passed between women, is now public, preserved in museums and public displays. It is noted in the documentary that Nüshu literature was rare as women were often buried with all of their writings. Its ‘discovery' has only been recent, as late as the 1980s.

Three women are at the forefront of the film. They share a deep interest in Nüshu albeit in different ways. Hu Xin receives various awards for her mastery over the language, and acts as a guide at the museum. Simu is a singer and calligrapher of Nüshu, and both look up to He Yanxin, the last of her generation that practised Nüshu. UNESCO notes it as the world's only language created and used exclusively by women - it is a language that is gendered in its existence.

This background knowledge makes the interactions of men with Nüshu very bizarre. There is a scene where a man talks about the necessity of commercialising Nüshu for its survival, and we are subjected to awkward scenes that reveal what this might mean. Singing to a crowd or performing is fairly standard, but there is a bizarre scene where a male developer proudly brandishes a phone that can translate Mandarin into Nüshu. Charging $300 for the phone, the crowd quickly starts to criticise it. There are more instances when a man complains about the size of Nüshu calligraphy (which is deliberately small), and another who comments that obedience, one of the qualities of Nüshu, is lacking in many women nowadays. The irony of these moments cannot be overstated, the spirit of Nüshu is utterly misunderstood by the various men that interact with it. No longer a secret, a series of men have waltzed in to make various decisions concerning Nüshu that do very little to honour its meaning.

It is only in the intimate and peaceful conversations with He Yanxin that we are reminded of the essence of Nüshu. Nüshu provided solidarity and sisterhood, it allowed women to voice their pain and suffering without fear of discovery. It offered solace and an outlet in its silent form of rebellion.

There is a scene in the documentary that will remain with me for some time. Simu is engaged and discusses life plans with her fiancé. His priority is for them to work as much as possible so they can buy a home. There is a moment when Simu questions her fiancé about what time she will have to actually practice Nüshu. The response of her fiancé is that her hobby isn't comparable to a real job. While Simu does not confront him on this point, there is a clear look of deep unease and dissatisfaction with this response. He adds that his mother worked in the day and then did house chores in the evenings, with the clear implication that Simu should work like his mother did without complaint. For a documentary that focuses on a language borne out of gendered oppression, the deliberate inclusion of this scene is to remind us that the past might not be as distant as we might assume.

The film is playing at Fragments Festival.

A beguiling watch that centres human connection in its commentary on agricultural workers in Tunisia - Erige Sehiri's Under The Fig Trees

Asma Ibrahim — 2023-06-05T10:39:47Z

Under the Fig Trees opens in rural Tunisia; we see a glorious blue sky streaked with hues of reddish yellow. It is the dawn of a new day, but it is also an immediate introduction to a key theme of the film - freedom. The camera slowly brings us to a group of women standing together by the side of a road, shortly after revealing a few men loitering nearby. The order is deliberate; while Under the Fig Trees centres on the lives of Tunisian harvesters, it gravitates towards the female experience overall. Throughout the film the camera showers us with close-up shots of their faces with such frequency and intimacy that the viewer often feels they are standing beside the women in their confidence. We catch every smile, every giggle and every soft look exchanged, all framed with golden rays of sunshine, at times this effect is almost halo-like. 

When a dilapidated pick-up truck appears and the group is crammed into the back inelegantly, one young lady makes her way to the front of the car. Her name is Fidé (Fidé Fdhili), clad in double denim and a loose red scarf, she is the most outspoken and fearless of the workers. The swaggering foreman, who wears rip-off Armani and his cap backwards, is sweet on her and affords her privileges like sitting in the passenger seat on their way to the orchard. His indiscreet flirting reveals a general weakness for women and a willingness to leverage his position to his advantage. Fidé takes advantage of this crush but is not taken in by his charms, revealing a strong cynicism towards romance and love in later conversations with female workers. Her previous disappointments have steeled her, and she warns women around her to focus on the betterment of their own lives rather than love and marriage. While her advice is sound, it seems to fall on deaf ears. Melek (Feten Fdhili), her sister, swoons over the sudden reappearance of her first love, Abdou, after a five-year disappearance and another worker, Sana (Ameni Fdhili), chats away excitedly about her love interest Firas, dreaming of their future together. Interestingly, through Sana, we see a playing of expectations around gender norms. In this case, it is the female character that desires a more conservative partner, and it is her that becomes easily jealous, confronting Fidé for flirting with Firas (Firas Amri). 

The film also touches on duality through its setting. Despite being filmed almost entirely outdoors, in an orchard without fences or walls, there is a strong sense of enclosure. The tree branches slowly start to morph into bars of a prison cell, the tree canopy becoming a ceiling separating the workers from the freedom offered by a boundless sky. The filming is deliberate, there aren't the regular wide expansive shots as expected of a setting like this, rather we are kept underneath the trees, forced to become intimately acquainted with the daily lives of harvesters under the relentless bright sun. 

Alongside the shining sun and vivid green leaves, there are furtive moments and conversations taking place in the solitude of the trees. A worker steals figs, their way of fighting against a system of exploitation and injustice. The foreman harasses a lone female worker, accusing her of seduction when she walks past him. There is a family dispute over land and inheritance. The fig farm is a microcosm of society. There are the young and the old. There is life and death, there is crime and punishment, there is trust and betrayal, love and anger and solidarity and frustration, but there is also hope. As the working day comes to an end, the women do their makeup and rearrange their clothes excitedly, the closeness of the camera infects the viewer with the same energy. There is a sense of liberation when they climb onto the pick-up truck again and begin to sing together. Looking closely, the workers are clearly tired after a long day of working, but they sing energetically and joyfully. The lyrics are not accessible to the audience, but as intended, the cheeky smiles give away that the song is not as innocent as one might initially assume. 

Erige Sehiri, the French-Tunisian director, had previously only made documentaries. This first foray into fictional features reveals that keen naturalism through a non-professional cast, sole use of natural lighting, and a relatively low-key plotline. Sehiri also brings touches of authenticity to her work through details like the red scarf that Fidé wears, originally belonging to Sehiri's grandmother, and an openness to improvisation. One of the most moving moments in the film is when an elderly man tries to calm Fidé down after her angry rant. He scolds her for speaking the way she does and defends the men of Tunisia that fought for independence. He says every word with heartfelt sincerity as he does not realise he has stumbled upon a crew filming a scene. 

Sehiri notes in an interview that she didn't intentionally write a positive film, but rather wanted to depict how the workers maintain positive attitudes and live life as much as they can despite their circumstances. This ties into the sense of solidarity that exists between the workers. The way Sana and Fidé talk to each other and share food over lunch break despite an explosive argument is indicative of their care for each other, and willingness to work past obstacles. There is no room for petty grudges, only a resolution to continue driving forward. Indeed, the journey to and from the orchard which bookends the film both heightens the sense of being stuck and adequately symbolises how all the workers are in the same situation, all in the same ‘truck'. With the old and young side by side, one can easily see how the young, denied opportunities, could continue to pick figs for years to come. There is a message here, that despite the Instagram selfies and relatable discussions about life and love, young people in rural areas like Kesra, Tunisia lack the same opportunities as people elsewhere. Once hailed as a success story following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now faces both political and economic instability, making it harder for the youth. 

Overall, Under the Fig Trees is a beguiling watch that centres human connection in its commentary on agricultural workers in Tunisia. As a fictional debut, Sehiri has firmly established her ability to balance depicting reality with nuanced storytelling.