50 mins
Rona Sela
Documentary
2017 - Israel

North American Premiere

Screening with: Emwas: Restoring Memories

The film deals with Palestinian archives plundered by Jewish/Israeli military bodies and soldiers, or looted by civilians who have internalized the corrupt codes of power during the 20th century and are controlled by the Israeli military archives. It explores, for the first time, how Israeli colonial regime takes as booty Palestinian treasures and conceals Palestinian history from the public sphere through aggressive control mechanisms. The film is dedicated to the cinematic and other treasures that Israel plundered in Beirut in the 1980s from various visual and research institutions and to their creators/scholars. Akin to a detective novel the film follows four characters that are involved in the fate of these Palestinian archives. But unlike the detective novel, all the characters are real and the narrators, who are not actors, lead them through an exchange of letters or monologs. The film is based entirely on archival materials, long research and interviews with the characters it portrays. Characters moving on an axis of time and place: Amman - Beirut - Tel Aviv- Fassuta. The film expose, for the first time, Palestinian materials that were plundered and erased deliberately from the public sphere by Israel and for many years were considered lost.

Q&A with director to follow.

Co-presenters:
UJPO Toronto
Faculty for Palestine
Arab Canadian Lawyers Associatio