For a “New Palestine Cinema” – part 2

Children Without Childhood

Khadijeh Habashneh. 1980, 21′

Children’s rights should always be a priority, but there are places and contexts where – on the contrary – they count for less than nothing.

Children without Childhood revolves around the lives of the children left  orphaned during the Tel al-Zaatar massacre in northeast Beirut in the summer of 1976. The film emphasizes the contradiction between the inalienable rights of the International Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the reality of the living conditions of Palestinian children.

Khadijeh Habashneh is a filmmaker, a central figure in the Palestine Cinema Institute and remains custodian of its archives, consolidating a lifelong commitment to the documentation and preservation of the Palestinian struggle. A clinical psychologist and organizer of the General Union of Palestinian Women, Habashneh has devoted particular attention to the conditions of women under occupation and the reality of the children.

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Why?
Monica Maurer. 1982, 28′

Beirut 1982: in the brutal siege, there is a strenuous struggle to survive the fierce attacks.

Film-testimony on the occupation war unleashed in the summer of 1982 by Israel against the Palestinian and Lebanese population in Beirut, a conflict aimed at annihilating the PLO presence in Lebanon. It recounts the systematic destruction of human life, humanitarian and civilian institutions (hospitals, schools, power plant, and even cemeteries) to starve the population, the use of weapons outlawed by the Geneva Convention, such as fragmentation and phosphorus bombs, which claimed thousands of victims-mostly women and children3. The film also documents the civilian resistance against the siege.

Monica Maurer (1942, Munich) an activist filmmaker who moved to Beirut in 1977 to work with the PLO’s Palestine Cinema Institute and, over the course of five years, made six 16 mm documentaries about and with the Palestinian Resistance.

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Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction

Michel Khleifi. 1984, 32′

To return to one’s home, even if destroyed, in order to affirm roots, memory and existence.

Like countless Palestinian villages since 1948, Ma’loul has been wiped off the map. Every year, on Israel’s “independence day” (the only day when permits are not required to move freely in the area) the expelled indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of Ma’loul return to their village, to show their children where they came from.

Michel Khleifi, a Palestinian from Nazareth who emigrated to Belgium as a young man, is one of the leading exponents of a Palestinian diaspora cinema. Through his filmography he has sought to construct a national identity of an ideal country, both geographically and socially, also focusing on the condition of women.