68 min
Mark Kaplan
Documentary
2013 - South Africa/Palestine/Israel
Toronto Premiere

Audience Award winner for best South African film at the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, The Village Under the Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under South Africa Forest. During the 1948 Nabka, more than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed. The Jewish National Fund raised money from around the world under the guise of ‘greening the desert’ and built forests and parks named after different countries on the remains of these villages in an attempt to erase their dark history. Writer/narrator Heidi Grunebaum revisits South Africa Forest, the forest she helped finance with the pennies she collected as a child twenty year ago. Using the forest and the ruins of Lubya as representative of a much wider process, this compelling film explores central themes of the Nakba – forced exile, erasure of memory, creating ‘facts on the ground’, and the Palestinian Right of Return.
Awards:
Audience Award, Best South African Documentary, Encounters International Film Festival, 2013

Co-presented by Independent Jewish Voices. Planet in Focus

Screened with 20 Handshakes for Peace