eight Palestinian women in resistance to protect their culture

LCP-AN – TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 AT 8:30 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

“Being Palestinian is a burden, in the sense that you must always defend yourself, justify yourself”, notes Ghadeer Dajani. This thirty-something, interior designer in Bir Zeit, a small university town near Ramallah, in the West Bank, presents, with a smile, the objects that she makes with her compatriots within the NGO Disarming Design. A classic-looking Palestinian-colored travel pillow is actually filled with stones that weigh it down. “This is the feeling that Palestinians have all the time,” she explains.

In June 2019, documentary filmmaker Mariette Auvray went to meet eight women in their thirties to tell about Palestinian culture because, she says, “They are for me the depositaries” just as much as ” of a certain idea of ​​resistance “.

After a quick and useful reminder of the facts about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and its fragmented geography, the journey begins. Direction Galilee, and the “mixed” city of Acre, to meet Safaa Hathot. In her pretty rap songs, the singer denounces the racist laws of the Israeli government as much as the patriarchy. Fashion designers are reclaiming traditional Palestinian patterns, a symbol of resistance, to make clothes.

Road trip process

Samaa Wakeem, dancer and choreographer, revives the past of the city of Haifa, through performances performed in the street. Mirna Barnieh, artist-researcher and chef, denounces the appropriation of Palestinian cuisine by Israeli society, works to make it visible and to make it travel, when Palestinians are assigned a deadly stillness.

From Haifa to Ramallah via Jerusalem, from fashion to the circus, the process of the road trip and its many landscapes is particularly relevant to show this assignment but also the invisibilization of Palestinian culture and history. Faced with this war of attrition, where the slightest movements are complicated, discrimination legalized and public spaces monopolized, these eight women draw horizons by creating their own spaces of expression and culture, and inflict defeat on the people. attempts to dehumanize their identities, reinjecting life and movement into one of the longest international conflicts and the occupation.

The screening of the film is followed by a debate moderated by Jean-Pierre Gratien with Inès Abdel Razek, director of advocacy for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, Alexandra Schwartzbrod, Deputy Editorial Director of Release and former correspondent in Jerusalem, and Georges Malbrunot, major reporter for Le Figaro, Middle East specialist.