This screening is part of: ARCHIVES OF POWER: THE PALESTINIAN FILM ARCHIVE AND THE ERASURE OF HISTORY
Azza El-Hassan uses rare 1970s and 1980s archival footage of the Palestinian national movement as well as a series of contemporary interviews with filmmakers, archivists, and historians to explore the role of filmmaking and photography during this period. At the heart of the film is her search for explanations for the apparently mysterious “loss” of the central Palestinian cinema archive in Beirut during the Israeli occupation.
Preceded by:
Palestine Film Unit / Mustafa Abu Ali
PALESTINE IN THE EYE
1977, 28 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. Produced by Palestinian Film Institute. Restored in 2017 by Azza El-Hassan, the founder of “The Void Project”, with the support of Creative Interruptions AHRC.
PALESTINE IN THE EYE chronicles the profound impact of Hani Jawharieh’s death for the Palestine Film Unit. The film reflects on his life through interviews with family, colleagues, and his own cinematography, including the moment of his death while filming for the Unit in 1976. Although the film has later been attributed to Mustafa Abu Ali, the Unit’s method of work was to describe everyone as a collective of “workers”, and we see this in the film titles, which collectively list the names of all those who participated as a non-hierarchical collective. Through this reflection on Jawharieh, we are offered an understanding of the workings of the Palestine Film Unit and its international connections.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.