Monday Night Tales: Narrativas Palestinas V
By Kit Macdonald
This double-bill of shorts takes in two works by the Canada-based Palestinian filmmaker, researcher and professor Razan Alsalah - one of her first, Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba (2018), and her most recent, A Stone's Throw (20240, which will be screened in Catalunya for the first time.
Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba is a seven-minute short in which a ghostly voice echoes: the disembodied, imaginary voice of the filmmaker’s grandmother, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon who was never able to return to her hometown. Her words appear in Google Street View images of Haifa, the only means she could have had to visit her lost home since the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
A Stone’s Throw unfolds over 40 minutes and follows Amine, an elderly Palestinian, who is exiled twice, from land and work, from Haifa to Beirut and to an offshore oil rig in the Gulf, drawing a line through oil extraction in the region and the colonisation of Palestine.