Palestine Film Fest opens with ‘poetic documentary’

AMMAN — Having found a kindred spirit in late Palestinian artist and author Hasan Hourani through his book “Hasan Is Everywhere,” Amman-born director Mais Darwazeh set out on a journey to look for “her lover” near “Palestine’s sea”.

The documentary “My Love Awaits Me by the Sea” is a record of that journey, following Darwazeh as she travels to her homeland for the first time to meet Hourani and listen to Palestinians talk about their dreams.

“My story changed when I met Hasan and heard his whispers among all the voices,” she says in the award-winning film, screened on Friday at the Rainbow Theatre at the opening of the second Welfare Association for Youth’s (WAY) Palestine Film Fest.

On her way to the seashore in  Jaffa, a place forbidden to Palestinians and where Hourani drowned in 2003 when he was 29, Darwazeh meets Palestinians who dream of the normal rather than the fantastic.

“This is our dream as Palestinians… to plant an orange orchard, to see Jaffa’s sea — what a big dream that is!” exclaims one of her interviewees, Nael Kanj.

“Mais was looking for the dream that allows us to go on,” producer Rula Nasser said after the screening.

“We were lucky [during filming] to meet people who were holding on to their dreams despite the occupation,” she added.

Though Palestinians may not be living in their homeland, their country lives within them and they take it wherever they go, Mohammad Reda Al Haj Ahmad, one of the interviewees, tells the director.

The interviews and images of Palestine under occupation in this “poetic documentary” are punctuated by Darwazeh’s simple illustrations of charcoal, pencil and water colours showing her imagined story with Hourani.

“When we reached Palestine, Hasan told me his story with the clouds, trapped for years between the sky and the sea, as [they are] suffocating from all the borders,” she narrates.

After the screening, speakers from the audience commended the director’s efforts in showing a more human side of the Palestinian cause, but Nasser said the making of the film was not without difficulties.

“It took us three years to develop the film and secure its financing,” she noted, adding that it is difficult to find sponsors for movies in the Arab world since they often go unreleased at local theatres and, therefore, fail to generate profit.

“The problem is that we are making films that are shown abroad but not at home,” added Nasser, who has produced critically acclaimed local features such as “The Last Friday” and “Transit Cities” and was chosen by Variety magazine in 2012 as one of the “top ten Arab producers to watch”.

Local response to such films is weak due to “a lack of curiosity”, she said, warning that “we are gradually disappearing” under an Israeli and Western offensive.

“One or two Palestinian films are released every year compared with some 30 Israeli films annually,” the producer said.

The WAY Palestine Film Fest, organised in collaboration with the Jerusalem Forum, continued on Saturday with the screening of “Flying Paper”, which documents young Gazans’ attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most kites ever flown, followed by the short films “Ismail”, “Maqloubeh”, “Give a Man a Fish” and “Though I know the River Is Dry”. 

The five films will be screened again on March 13 at the Rainbow Theatre, according to WAY. 

“My Love Awaits Me by the Sea” will be repeated on March 14, followed by “The Wanted 18”, an animated documentary that follows a group of Palestinians in Beit Sahour working to start a dairy industry during the first Intifada.

Proceeds from the festival will go to support Al Bayyara project, which is aimed at the rehabilitation of public playgrounds in the city of Deir El Balah in Gaza, according to WAY.

Tickets are available online on www.karasi.com.