74 min
Kathy Wazana
Documentary
2013 - Canada
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TPFF’s Arab World Perspectives program shines a cinematic light on another part of the Middle East. This year, TPFF will focus on Morocco, specifically its former Jewish inhabitants and the friends and neighbours they left behind. Shot in Morocco and Israel-Palestine, Toronto filmmaker Kathy Wazana’s film is part historical investigation, part poetic/musical essay on loss and longing and the possibilities of coexistence. Wazana sets out to discover why hundreds of thousands of Jews left Morocco in the 1960s, believing their Arab homeland had become enemy territory. What she found was a country still grieving the loss of its Jewish population. The film uncovers a forceful series of events that put an end to 2000 years of Jewish-Arab coexistence and exposes the political manoeuvres that led to the mass exodus of Jews from their ancestral homeland to Israel, and to the dispossession and exile of the Palestinian people. Musical collaborations and dramatic landscapes are the backdrop for this journey into the suppressed history of Arab Jews.
Co-presented by International Disapora Film Festival
Screened with From Al-Araqib to Susiya