When return is interrupted, memory finds other routes. Bringing together three experimental films, this programme traces how voices, maps, and imagined conversations become ways of navigating inaccessible homelands, preserving collective memory, and sustaining relationships to places that can no longer be reached, but are never left behind.

Screened as part of Falastin Film Festival (27—30 August).

About the films

Jayce Salloum: untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends..

A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and flowers growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 slaughter at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Cloud footage, Hubbell space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present context and foreshadowing trajectory. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession & genocide.

Hajar Ibrahim: Memory Is a Stranger (Flowers of Sudden Return)

Memory is a Stranger (Flowers of a Sudden Return) is a short archival-experimental documentary assembled from family footage filmed by the filmmaker’s late grandfather in Gaza’s Nuseirat Refugee Camp, alongside an auditory landscape gathered over several years and made up entirely from her own recordings archiving the families oral testimonies and gatherings, protests, family folkloric songs, and field recordings. Unable to return herself, the filmmaker turns to Google Earth as part of an earlier Palestinian practice of digital return, echoing Darby’s 2006 “Nakba Layer,” which used satellite imagery to help refugees ‘visit’ destroyed and existing Palestinian villages. The film follows her two grandmothers oral testimonies of defiantly enacting a return home to Jerusalem and Gaza despite the occupation’s restrictions and siege. The film foregrounds less-recounted histories of return rather than displacement, tracing memory as a layered absence that is continually mediated generationally. Across three generations, return is enacted and remembered differently: by her grandmothers through physical acts of return, by her mother through lived memories of Gaza reawakened by family footage, and by the filmmaker through an inherited memory that becomes the film itself.

Razan AlSalah: A Stone’s Throw

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A Stone’s Throw trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

After the screening there will be a Q+A with the directors.