film

Originally released earlier this year, A House In Jerusalem's timing was grimly apposite given recent events in the Middle East. Written and directed by the Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan and based on his own family history, the film tells the story of a Jewish-British family that moves into a seemingly abandoned house in Jerusalem. Alayan's own family were among around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled from what had just become Israel during the Nakba in 1948, and this history inspired A House In Jerusalem.

The British family's young daughter, Rebecca, begins experiencing strange paranormal encounters with a ghostly Palestinian girl and comes to believe the house is haunted. As the story progresses the house becomes a metaphor for displacement, loss and the thoroughly unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An eerie, slow-burning atmosphere shrouds the film, which is child-friendly and takes an interesting and novel approach to making its point.