프로그램 노트

Program Note​

This is a poignant and persistent record of Palestinian women's survival—a personal and reflective essay film that traces the lives of four generations of women: director Lina Soualem, her mother Hiam Abbass, her grandmother Nemat, and her great-grandmother Um Ali. At its heart, it is a meditation on what it means to live as a woman, including the filmmaker herself.

As we follow the trajectories of their lives, we come face to face with questions of war and displacement, survival and death, the joys and sorrows of encounter and farewell, the complexities surrounding the history and identity of the diaspora, the tensions within and across borders, and the meaning and value of mother tongues and bilingualism. 

The film's key guide and narrator is Hiam Abbass. Following her desire for love and her dream of becoming an actor, she left her hometown of Tiberias for Europe. Her choice is nothing less than a trajectory of determination—not to conform to the conditions given to her, but to become her own self. The film carries the power to gently prompt reflection on the time it takes to return to the place one left, and on what it means to return home. Archival footage from the 1940s, home videos from the 1990s, faded photographs, poems written by Hiam in her teenage years and recited again in her middle age, recollections of the past, visits to places of memory in an attempt to recreate the past—all these are woven together. Intertwining historical materials with cinematic approaches available in the present, these women continue to connect and carry forward their long, enduring history. (JEONG Jihye)