On the opening night of the 7th edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, on October 24, 2024, the master of ceremonies gave a speech about the magic of cinema and its power to influence people and transcend cultural barriers around the world. That, then, is the mission of an international festival: to ensure that plural voices are heard, recognized and scattered to the four winds.
With the initiative of representing the culture and stories of the Palestinian people, this year the festival inaugurated the Windows on Palestine session, a selection of short films aimed at giving a voice to a nation in the midst of a war, where thousands of children, women and men are murdered by bombs that don’t care who they are, but only the space they occupy. This is an old story, but since the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7th, 2023, a new chapter has been added to the pages of this unfortunate narrative, and the language of cinema has become a tool to communicate the event, but above all to convey feelings that are almost impossible to express.
After winning two awards at Cannes, Maha Haj, who was Born in Nazareth but is a self-proclaimed Palestinian, decided to make a short film, co-produced by Juliette Lepoudre of Still Moving from France, to tell us moving stories about resilience, repeating the same mistakes of the past, and irreplaceable pain.
Haj’s film Upshot won the highest honor in its category, the Golden Star for Short Film, and it couldn’t have been any different. The characters Suleiman and Lubna live in isolation on a farm and discuss their children’s life choices, until the arrival of an unwanted stranger puts the idyllic world they have created at stake. The film manages to shatter our emotions and leave us gasping for air as it brings us face to face with the results of bombs dropped at random.
Other filmmakers have adopted genre cinema to convey their feelings about this journey. In Rakan Mayasi’s The Key, a couple have trouble sleeping when their daughter starts hearing someone trying to get into their house in Israel every night. No one is actually there, but their inner concioence hears people saying they want to go back to their homes. In an atmosphere of terror and suspense, the film creates its metaphors to remind us of the massacre in Palestine. Mike Elsherif, in Maqluba, uses mystery and fantasy to narrate a journey of abandonment of home (fleeing danger) and memories.
From the children’s point of view, A Short Film About Kids by Ibrahim Handal, and Khaled and Mena by Dahdal Sohail, show how the new generation sees the deprivation of the little things in normal life, such as swimming in the sea, located on the other side of an impassable wall in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, or the lack of freedom to play on their own land with their pet goat without being threatened by Israeli soldiers.
All these films fill our imaginations with sensations and emotions, not just footage of bombed-out houses and landscapes. Putting faces and life goals on a territory makes the whole world realize that war is not just about disputes over ideas, conversations and geopolitical power, but also about destroyed lives, interrupted dreams and, moreover, human beings with the same purposes – like all of us – living their lives in the best way possible.
Letícia Alassë
Edited by Yael Shuv
© FIPRESCI 2024