Provoked Narratives is an invitation, in this time of genocide and ongoing aggression, to understand the narratives created around Palestine as part of a long colonial project, a blueprint of violence. To consider the ways in which the camera, since its very inception as a new tool, has played a conflicted role in the project of empire. To consider how images have been co-opted, and to see how images can also resist.
Kufr Shuba
Samir Nimr, 1975, 35′
In Arabic with English subtitles
An iconic work produced by the Palestine Cinema Institute in Beirut, Kufr Shuba was directed by the Iraqi filmmaker Samir Nimr, and named after the village of Kufr Shuba in South Lebanon, which was the site of solidarity between the Lebanese people and the Palestinian resistance following a fierce battle that devastated the village. Kufr Shuba’s filmic structure is reminiscent of Mustafa Abu Ali’s seminal 1974 film They Do Not Exist in its oscillation between lyrical aesthetics and political statement – from Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the UN General Assembly to “address the question of Palestine” to the reflections of resistance fighters crouching beneath the trees. Stylistically rich, the film’s long landscape shots following Palestinian and Lebanese freedom fighters disappearing between the olive groves also echoes the 1971 film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War by the Japanese Red Army (JRA) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was also shot in Lebanon and drew on on fûkeiron, Japanese theory of landscape cinema. The film is a poetic testament to the steadfastness of Palestinian and Lebanese people, to their commitment to the liberation struggle, and their love for the land. As an affectionate voice-over refers to the village of Kufr Shuba as “the head of the arrow of an enduring warrior,” the clear political message is that solidarity is the only way to victory.
Why?
Monica Maurer, 1982, 28′
In Arabic with English subtitles
Activist filmmaker Monica Maurer (1942, Munich) moved to Beirut in 1977 to work with the PLO’s Palestine Cinema Institute and over the course of five years, made six 16mm documentaries about and with the Palestinian resistance. After a successful collaboration in The Fifth War (1979) and Palestine Red Crescent (1980), filmmaker Maurer teamed up once again with Iraqi filmmaker Samir Nimr to make Why?. Shot in Beirut and released during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the film both portrayed the brutality of the siege and the indiscriminate attacks as well as people’s survival. The film is rhythmed by the urgency of sirens, communicating the human toll of the violence to a wider world in an attempt to rally support for the Palestinian revolution. Simultaneously, the film is loaded with the specter of an unclear future, the seeds of a massacre that was yet to come.
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