ART AND FILMS

AN-NAJAH UNIVERSITY

On Sunday, I spent a bit of time at An-Najah University seeing an art exhibition and then a film being shown as part of the Palestine Human Rights Film Festival. I was shown around by Sajah, a student who also does some volunteering with Project Hope. (As ever, I have no idea if I’ve spelt the name correctly.) The art exhibition was really impressive. Everything that was there was made by hand by the students. There was silver jewellery, wood carvings, calligraphy and drawings. I was really impressed by all the creativity on show. There was one artist that really impressed me, but I’ll talk about her in a separate post.

WOOD CARVINGS

Then I went to see the film. It was called “Children in Gaza”. It covered the effects of the recent Gaza War on different children growing up in that area, including the psychological effects of living in a war zone and seeing family members being killed in front of you. They hadn’t been able to get a copy of the film with English subtitles past the border, but Sajah was kind enough to translate for me the key points. It didn’t need much translation, though, as the suffering was written all over the children’s faces. It was a very well made and important film, but I found it so hard to watch. I was left feeling that there was no hope for these kids, given all they’d seen.

I couldn’t handle working in Gaza.

The next day, however, I saw another film as part of the festival that acted as a useful counter-point. This was the story of “Budrus”, a village in the West Bank that was due to have an Israeli security wall running through it. The building of the wall was going to require the uprooting of the majority of the village’s olive trees, and therefore the villagers’ livelihoods. (Uprooting of olive trees on Palestinian land is a common occurrence by Israeli forces, always in the name of “security”.) The villagers, led by a local activist called Ayed Morrar who was at the screening, held non-violent demonstrations against the building of the wall. They used women in the front line of their demonstrations, sought and achieved political unity between Fatah, Hamas and other political groups on the issue and maintained their non-violent stance in the face of extreme provocation, and violence, by the Israeli army. Eventually, Israel decided to change the root of the security wall, saving Budrus and many other villages in a similar situation. It’s maybe a relatively small victory, given the recent history of the region, but it was good to see something that could be considered as a success story, certainly for the people of Budrus.

So these were two films depicting the ying and the yang, no hope and then maybe a little bit of hope. I guess that’s what it’s about in these parts.