La mémoire fertile
Al-Dhakira Al-Khasiba | Memoria Fertile
by
MOVIE CATEGORY
A Palestinian family in 1980 risks having their land expropriated by Israeli forces. For Michel Khleifi, director of the first film made by a Palestinian on Palestinian land, it is the right opportunity to build, with the perfect e right distance, an anthropological observatory of the habits of some women, involved in the most diverse household activities. The contact with the land, the relationship with the institutions, their own personal passions, the claims for their gender, the indispensable domestic rituals: La mémoire fertile stands up as a photograph of a historical moment of Palestinian women, and therefore as a memorandum for present and future responsibilities, which are hopefully as fertile as the lands that the protagonist family risks having to give up. Because they would not only lose their home and its abstract concept, but they would lose matter, touch, substance.
DIRECTORY
Born in Nazareth in 1950 to a Palestinian working class family and emigrated to Belgium in 1970 where he studied theatre and television at the INSAS in Brussels and worked for RTBF (Belgian Television), Michel Khleifi is considered the founder of contemporary Palestinian cinema and one of its more original voices.
His first feature-length documentary is Fertile Memory (1980), the first film made in Palestine under occupation, in which lyrical aesthetics and critical political commitment are combined.
With Zindeeq (2009), his latest feature film written and directed to date, he won the Golden Muhr at the Dubai International Film Festival 2009.
Khleifi lives in Brussels, where for over thirty years he taught directing at INSAS; furthermore, he has held numerous teaching positions at Columbia University, St Joseph University in Beirut and the AM Qattan Foundation in Palestine and Jordan.
