I am writing this after a deep dive into this year’s Pravo Ljudski programme Palestine as Collective Future: Notes on Resistance and Liberation, but also a year of deep diving into Palestinian history, into the history of colonial violence that is the history of Palestine, a year of trying not to look away from the dismembered bodies of the genocide in Gaza, which is a direct consequence of this history. I am also writing this on a day in which my thoughts are with film director Abbas Fahdel, who is at this very moment seeking a safe place for him and his family, because their home in South Lebanon is not safe anymore since Israel started attacking Lebanon as if it just declared a second Gaza, an act of violence that has always been imminent – as we see in The Diary of a Sky by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a video essay which shows how Israel’s omnipresent and ominous military flights over Lebanon – sometimes up to 50 flights a day – have, in the past, made sure that the people there never really felt safe. And also in the case of the imminent invasion of Lebanon today, the international community, which by now we know is simply a term for a couple of mutually enabling western superpowers, does not lift a finger. After all, it is the same international community that either participated in or supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the above mentioned Abbas Fahdel has documented in his monumental film Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015). The common denominator of the ever repeating cycle of this killing and displacement, be it in Palestine or Lebanon, is colonial violence.

The past year was also a year in which we realised that some, who think and live films as many of us do, prefer to stay silent. An act that Edward Said once defined as “those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”

Still, this past year, it is literature and films and the discussion that they bring, with the ones who refuse to turn their gaze away, that I hold on to, to focus my thoughts, but also to gain fleeting moments of feeling that resistance is possible, that it lies as much in the hands of common individuals, as it does in those individuals joining in collective thinking and practicing of this resistance. In line with participating in this collective thinking, here are my personal notes on the films of this year’s Pravo Ljudski focus on Palestine, scattered threads of thoughts that I hope we can weave into a more complex fabric together at the festival.

*To never forget the history of violence and let this replace the empty phrasing of never again, that has proved – almost ironically, again and again – to be futile. Only by doing that can we inform our present with knowledge that the past has to offer, with which we can think of the possible liberated futures. A Fidai Film (2024), as well as PARADISO, XXXI, 108 (2022) by Kamal Aljafari are just that – foregrounding the history and sabotaging how this history is written by the colonizers. A Fidai Film, made solely out of archival footage, combines visual interventions into the official Israeli archives, turning these images against themselves, with parts of the PLO archives, which the Israeli army looted during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. The history of the centre, where the archives were kept itself speaks volumes. The Israelis first tried to destroy the centre in 1972. A letter was sent to the director of the institute with explosives, which exploded in his face and he was seriously injured. Later, there was an attempt to plant a bomb outside the building, which was unsuccessful. In 1982, when Beirut was attacked, the Israeli army looted everything, the whole building. A few months later, when the Israeli army withdrew from Beirut, some of the workers from the research centre returned and started to rebuild the library. A car bomb was planted in front of the centre, which exploded in front of the building, killing everyone. As the director pointed out in a conversation I had with him at Visions du Reel – this shows how no theft of land is ever enough for the colonizers, as it always goes hand in hand with destroying the indigenous history, their knowledge, their culture: “The aim is for Palestine not to exist – nor as a place, but also not even as an idea.” – Quoted from the interview in Kino! magazine, spring 2024. Similarly to Aljafari’s films, Oraib Toukan makes use of footage shot by the late photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawharieh in her film Via Dolorosa (2021). Playing with the footage, slowing it down, re-editing it, together with a commentary by literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub brings us a study of the role of images in colonial violence. The film pushes us to think about the importance of who makes the images, who assembles them and who accompanies them with a narrative, thus becoming an analysis of what Toukan defines as “cruel images”, images in which the subjects have been degraded with their use, reuse and circulation, all the while thinking about the radical possibilities of dismantling and reusing of such images.

Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019), one of the most important Arab filmmakers, dedicated her work to documenting the violent history she herself witnessed. Today, as we see history repeating itself with Israel bombing of Lebanon and escalating violence by hour, Saab can help us understand the roots of the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Beirut My City (1982) was shot right after the 1982 invasion. With camera in her hand, Saab went to search for what was left from the chaos of destroyed refugee camps and neighbourhoods. In the film, considered a classic work of Lebanese cinema, Saab asks herself when did this violence start and paints an uncompromising portrait of the city in ruins and the ones who were left with nothing, so that we cannot possibly look away.

*To know that colonial violence is capitalist violence, since colonial powers have always waged war on indigenous people’s relationship with land, often using green-imperialist environmental laws to do so. Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022) talks about just that. In 1977, Israel enacted a law that made it illegal for Palestinians to pick za’atar, an herb, and akkoub, a thistle akin to an artichoke or asparagus, both historical staples of Palestinian cuisine. Through reenacted trials and conversations with both Palestinian foragers and Israeli farmers, who took the seeds of the herbs which are now forbidden to be picked, and are now cultivating them and selling them back to the Arab sector, the film shows us the difference between having a relationship with the land and nature and what it gives us, and using this very land and nature for profit on the other hand. It also shows us how a seemingly small act as herb picking is can become an act of resistance. After all, with the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and their man-made famine, we see that precisely because of the tradition of foraging and because of knowing their land, some Gazans can now help themselves with eating weeds such as khobeza, a spinach-like leafy wild plant also called mallow.

*To listen to individuals and their personal stories so as to never let the violence turn them into numbers. Just as Lina Soualem does in Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), when knitting together individual stories into her family history in Palestine. Soualem interviews her mother, the internationally acclaimed actress Hiam Abbass, and aunts, talking about their home in Tiberias, from which the family was exiled in 1948, as well as their life in Deir Hamma, and the life of her mother and herself, who are living abroad. A life also always heavily influenced and not made easier by the fact that they are women. The exiles, forced and voluntary, make the women in the family even more persistent in preserving memories and personal histories, even though the past might be inseparable from pain. Watching the film and thinking about the complexities and pains of every single woman in the family is an exercise in understanding how the history of violence changes the lives of so many of whom we may not ever hear the stories of, but who nonetheless exist and struggle because of this violence every single day.

In a similar spirit, the already mentioned late Lebanese film director Jocelyne Saab’s film Palestinian Women (1974) focuses on Palestinian women, who have often been overlooked when depicting the Palestinian struggle. Women who have been exiled from their homeland be it during the Nakba as children, in later escalations of Israeli violence or because of their political dedication to the liberation of Palestine. Most of them live in Lebanese refugee camps. They have educated themselves and want to teach other women in the camps and want to be actively involved in the liberation struggle in one way or another, many also joining the guerrilla fighters. Just as the women of Lina Soualem’s family, the women portrayed by Saab are clear; the fight against colonial violence is also a fight against patriarchal violence and oppression.

*To never turn our gaze away from the eyes of the perpetrators and their enablers. So that they know that we see and we know. Such rebellious staring down the barrel of a gun, a forensic one for that matter, is Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s film Rubber Coated Steel (2016), in which Hamdan activates an audio analysis of the killing of two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher by the Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, an analysis that proves the guilt of the Israeli army for a killing that saw no trial and which, as with so many others, the Israeli army would want us to forget.

*To know that to decolonize means to decolonize all areas of our lives. And to know that, if we want decolonization to mean much more than a hot topic for academics, this also means the right of return for the ones who were chased off their land as early as 1948.

*To resist as we know, as we can, in every possible way.

Petra Meterc