SUMMARY
This film explores the last 70 years of Palestinian politics seen through the prism of the life of the filmmaker’s father, Dr. Elias Shoufani, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and an academic and leftist intellectual who was one of the leaders of the opposition to Arafat within Fatah for 20 years. Born in Ma’liya in the Galilee and educated at the Hebrew University and Princeton, the multilingual and erudite Dr. Shoufani was also the Arab world’s leading analyst of Israeli affairs for more than a generation. His opposition to policies meant to lead toward a two-state solution was grounded in his political clarity and prescience about the direction in which Israel was headed and his understanding that this would never, in fact, be allowed to be realized.
To try and understand his choice to give up a tenured position at a US university and join the underground PLO in Beirut, the filmmaker made a documentary that traced her family’s evolution through Palestine’s 20th century history, starting in 1948. The film recreates Palestinian history using archive, family photos/8mm films, old photos, cartoons, animation, macro-photography footage, worldwide interviews, and multimedia formats in a video-art style documentary—a personal and political memoir.
The trip for information to solve the mystery of what her father did in his life took the filmmaker five years hunting down archives and filming in seven different cities. But it finally enabled her to come to an understanding of where she came from and helped shape her life choices thereafter.
GALLERY
