Mathijs Poppe
Belgium | 2017 | 42 min
International Premiere
Language : Arabic
Subtitles : English, French
“This film tells a story that started in 1948, when thousands of Palestinians fled their country, in fear of the ongoing massacres. We will pick the story up years later, in an imaginary future. A future in which Palestine is free again.” Thus opens the film by Mathijs Poppe, who, by creating the fiction of a possible return with the inhabitants of the Shatila camp, implicitly writes a history of Palestine and the Palestinians. Over the narrow streets, in the confined apartments into which entire families are crammed, the tight frames and the image in chiaroscuro reveal a life of waiting, suspended. Redoing passports, selling the washing machine to buy a car, contacting the Israeli setlers who are occupying the house to warn them of their return: everyone busies themselves preparing the voyage to the home or dreamed land. Those who have never seen it make an imaginary tableau of it, describing the beauty of an ideal landscape that makes the reality of the camp crueller with each sentence. For, this country of words, even inaccessible, is the cradle of an identity forged in exile, alive despite and against everything.
Céline Guénot
