Video Concerning the Arab World

TransArab Itinerant 2003-2005

2003 / 2005 / 2006 / 2009 - TransArab

Video Concerning the Arab World

This programme is not intended to provide an overview of independent video in Arab and Islamic countries, nor does it seek to be representative in any way.

The works being presented, like the programme as a whole, reflect the notion of “slices of reality”, in the sense that they are subjective visions, aware of their partiality, which do not exclude contradiction or conflict. Visions that perceive a strong tension on their surface and take up these eddies of confusion and violence as cause for  urgent reflection and knowledge.

Images and stories, realities in themselves, rhizomatic realities: interwoven without a centre or a fixed meaning. And for that very reason, instead of giving rise to cultural dualism based on opposition, they engender a web of underground connections.

Qualb el Umur (QU) is a project of the Arab Education Forum. It provides spaces and opportunities for people, especially young people, to work in small groups, to reflect on and express their work and experiences, and interact, learn, communicate, and build. This film is the first products of the QU project in Palestine and were done in cooperation with Palestine Mirror Production and the popular Art Center. The Children were given the space to work on their own films and learn and grow through reflecting on their life and trough teamwork. In the film A Day in our Life, the children aged 12-16 years present their life in the Amari refugee camp in Ramallah. They use documentary as well as role play to introduce the audience to details of daily life in a refugee camp in Ramallah, including people's memory which is an integral part of their life.

A 13-minute lyrical piece, based on a poem by Nadia Habib. An appeal for hope against despair, it reminds us that beyond the politics of occupation, Israelis and Palestinians live and work and suffer loss, side by side.

About Home shows what happen when people live more than 60 years in a refugee camp. The film goes inside the intimate life of a Palestinan familiy to show their thoughts, desires and contradictions after more than half a century living in Lebanon as a refugees. About Home explores the meaning of living in stand-by in an atmosphere of hate, violence and arms. Small clockwork bombs inhabiting a compulsive country.

Through the story of Bir'im, a destroyed Palestinian village, we encounter Nahida and two other women from the kibbutz built on its land. The trio's moving story focuses on a struggle for the return of the villagers to their homeland, a central issue in the Palestinian experience.

The testimonies of Arab infiltrators in Israel.

Five Palestinian, Israeli and international activists paint themselves blue and don pointy ears and tails that make them look like the characters in the film Avatar. Although their colonisers are from different origins, the Avatars, like the Palestinians, fight imperialism. 'The Avatars' presence in Bil'in today symbolizes united resistance to imperialism of all kinds.

“Avenge But One of My Two Eyes” is a ramble between three arenas at the height of the “El Aqsa” Intifada: the practice of the Masada cult, reinvented in the mid-1940s and interwoven with the leading Zionist discourse, the condition of oppression and besiegement of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and the continuous religious and secular cult of Samson, aka “Samson the Hero”. Real places, times and situations penetrate one another and integrate, presenting the Israeli reality as it is: embroiled, violent, suicidal.

On June 4, 2008, Barack Obama spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C.