In the Shatila refugee camp, established in Lebanon after the forced displacement of thousands of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948, families in an imagined future prepare for their long-awaited return to Palestine. What begins as a hopeful preparation gradually becomes a poignant reflection on the gap between their cherished dream and the harsh realities of daily life. This hybrid documentary intertwines dreams and memories with the everyday, exploring the meaning of exile and the power of imagination to sustain hope.
“We have a country of words.
Speak speak so I can put my road
on the stone of a stone.
We have a country of words.
Speak speak so we may know
the end of this travel.”
Ending of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem We Travel Like Other People
“With the help of the people that I got to know in Shatila, I wrote a script which adds a fictional layer to the film. This fictional layer is a visualisation of the desire that lives in many Palestinians' hearts: to return to their home country. As any people in exile, Palestinian refugees’ identity is defined by Palestine, their home country on the one hand, and Lebanon as a temporary residence on the other. The scripted scenes in the film are used to obtain a better understanding of the reality of Palestinians in Lebanon. It is exactly through the words they use, as actors, to talk about the fictional return to Palestine, that we can understand more deeply what it means to them personally to live in exile. By sharing the production process with them, we can tackle this project as equals and find out what kind of film we can make together.”
Mathijs Poppe
“‘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 / Visions du Réel
