"The British, as in Ireland, implemented collective punishment in Palestine"

BarcelonaIn Fidai film, by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari (Rambla, 1972), begins with the destruction, during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, of the Palestine Research Center, created in 1965 to collect photographs, films and documents on the country's history. Israeli soldiers came in, took everything and destroyed the building. It was not the first time they had tried to take this archive of Palestinian collective memory. In the 1970s they sent a letter bomb and blew up a car in front of the building. After 1982 there was another attempt to recover documentation on Palestinian history, but the attacks returned. "The Israelis were very persistent," explains Aljafari. "When it comes to finding answers, logic doesn't work. They only think like soldiers. They think that everything is propaganda and that all the material is useful to study the enemy. They build a kind of catalogue where they describe, for example, how a child walks along a muddy path. I wonder what danger there is in this," he adds.

Aljafari is the main guest of the fifth edition of the The Unexpected Festival from Barcelona, ​​which takes place at the Filmoteca until February 23. It is an opportunity to see international titles and non-fiction by local authors that do not circulate enough through the usual festivals and exhibition channels, and an open window to other ways of telling stories. There are practically no words in the filmmaker's film, nor is it intended to report on the situation in the country as a journalistic document would. It is very poetic, with images of violence and brutality, but also of a rural Palestine, from the last century, very bucolic.

"I couldn't recover the material from the archive and what I did was try to find as many other archives and resources as possible to create another narrative, a kind of cinematic resistance. I'm not a historian, but, with all the limitations I have, I have tried to construct a history of Palestine that did so with the British Mandate. They serve the Israelis. They even use the same police stations. The British, as in Ireland, put into practice collective punishment.

Cinema as resistance

The images of cultivated fields, ponds, mountains dotted with caves, villages and men and women working could be from any other Mediterranean country. "When you see these images you realise how everything can be interrupted by an occupation and all the suffering that it entails. I work above all with images and poetry. I think that poetry can be a great weapon of resistance and also give a voice to the Palestinians. They have taken everything from us, the archives, the land. We have nothing, we have to make films."

With all this the filmmaker achieves the empathy of the public. "I'm not just talking about the Palestinians, but about the human condition in general. The Israelis have a lot of resources, and with their propaganda they have managed to dehumanize us in the eyes of the world, to separate us from the rest. Many people have come to Palestine, for example the Armenians who fled the ethnic cleansing that they undertook, we are also Turkey, Somos.

Palestine does not have a film industry like other countries may have. In addition, there is uprooting. Many filmmakers live in exile, like Aljafari, who left Palestine 25 years ago and has lived in different countries around the world. "The Israelis have a great structure and a lot of money. We are a small country, without allies, but I think that there is more and more empathy for everything that is happening in Gaza. Getting this empathy is a daily struggle. We cannot talk about Palestinian cinema in the industrial sense, but there are many Palestinians spread around the world who try to do it. What has happened in Palestine could happen in many other places. It has been a long process of Israeli propaganda to make its own society, and other countries, believe that our lives are worth less than those of others."

The filmmakers, trapped

All the atrocities that the Palestinian people are experiencing mean that the filmmakers have little time to talk about anything else. "We are trapped in a way, we would like to be free and be able to tell other things, but right now it is difficult not to talk about the conditions in which we live, because what is in danger is our very existence. I have lived in Germany and it is not very different from what happened during Nazism. Sometimes I see the news about killing everyone. These are very dark times."