This article appeared in the September 6, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

When I Saw You (Annemarie Jacir, 2012)

Early in her 2019 essay film, Letter to a Friend, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir cuts from journalistic footage of the Israeli military firing tear gas onto her street in Bethlehem to a video she filmed of the same incident from inside her familial home, Dar Jacir. Earlier, in voiceover, she explains that journalistic reports “only ever mention Ayda [refugee] camp . . . [and] completely overlook all the non-camp homes in and around—as if we don’t exist.” By inserting herself in the action, she contests these narrative erasures. As the film subsequently develops its speculative investigation of Dar Jacir as well as Israel’s expanding architecture of occupation around Bethlehem, the “view from the house” becomes a recurrent motif that bears witness to Palestinian presence on the land.

Comparing images from her family’s Ottoman-era archives with maps, photographs, and videos she has collected over the last two decades, Jacir emphasizes how settlements, walls, and checkpoints have steadily encroached upon the Jerusalem-Hebron road, which was once “always full of people moving, caravans passing through.” Letter to a Friend gradually counterbalances these documentations of dispossession by developing a collective portrait of Jacir’s home, her neighbors, and her friends. In its loving reconstruction of their lives and labors, the film demonstrates how Palestinians not only “exist” within but also creatively contest the ongoing occupation.

Letter to a Friend screens on September 7 as part of the series My Homeland Is Not a Suitcase: Annemarie Jacir, Emily Jacir, and Dar Jacir for Arts and Research at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. The series showcases films by Emily and her sister Annemarie alongside selections from their decades-long work curating and preserving Palestinian films, as well as their collaborations with the many artists who have spent time at Dar Jacir, which they converted into an arts and cultural space in 2014. Currently led by Emily and programs director Aline Khoury, Dar Jacir is a multifaceted communal space which hosts artist residencies, workshops, seminars, curated exhibitions, and other artist-led programming across educational, cultural, and agricultural sectors. Grounded in an ethos of kinship and collaboration (its full name is Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, in honor of the sisters’ father), Dar Jacir’s work to preserve, restore, and reclaim Palestinian cultural histories embodies Emily and Annemarie’s decades-long practices, which have each developed their own means of challenging the occupation, communing with the past, and creating living archives of the present.

My Homeland Is Not a Suitcase—whose title is drawn from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish—makes these continuities newly visible. Emily’s multidisciplinary work is anchored in both archival research and performance as means of excavating silenced histories; her films are often exhibited in installation formats and share an elliptical, observational style attuned to the rhythms and intimacies of everyday life. Annemarie primarily works in narrative filmmaking: she has written and directed seven shorts as well as three features, two of which—2012’s When I Saw You and 2017’s Wajib—appear in this program. Her films dramatize experiences of exile through narratives of intergenerational conflict, developed with tenderness and wry humor.

The frictions between conditions of possibility in the past and present—between the revolutionary horizon of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the lived realities of occupation in the post–Oslo Accords era—can be felt in the motifs of restricted mobility and deferred action that cut across both sisters’ films. In Emily’s short Lydda Airport (2009), a plane takes off and a woman waits with a bouquet of flowers for an arrival that does not come, evoking the history of foreclosed movement written into the airport itself: Lydda Airport was captured by Israeli forces in 1948, and today it is Ben Gurion International Airport. Annemarie’s fiction feature When I Saw You follows a mother, Ghaydaa, and her son, Tarek, who have been displaced to a refugee camp in Jordan in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war. The images of children at play in the refugee camp echo footage in Qais al-Zubaidi’s Away From Home (1969), while the film’s overall structure, which moves from the refugee camp to the fedayeen training camp, mirrors the narrative progression of Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Do Not Exist (1974)—both films appear in the Jacirs’ archival programs for the Anthology series. But When I Saw You also seeks new ground beyond these historical referents: in its final scene, mother and son leave both camps behind to make a break for the Palestinian border. As they run back to their homeland, the film suspends them in a freeze frame, preserving their attempted return as a vision of ongoing possibility.

When I Saw You ultimately refuses to overshadow the past with either the stain of political failure or the melancholia of loss, instead attesting that images and ideas survive, travel, and transform in the collective imagination. This gesture is extended by the series as a whole, which spans feature-length films, shorts, video installations, and performance-based projects that blur the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and experimental film. Drawing continuities between the revolutionary cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporary work of the Jacir sisters, their friends, and their collaborators, it showcases the myriad ways that Palestinians and their allies have worked to “recuperate . . . fragments of the collective memory [as] part of the cultural resistance against occupation,” as Monica Maurer states in her film Yom el-Ard/Land Day (1981/2019). Some, like Maurer, do so by preserving and reframing the visual archives of Palestinian struggle; others reappropriate Western representations of Palestinians to subvert their dehumanizing logic (The Visit [Qais Al-Zubaidi, 1972], Introduction to the End of an Argument [Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, 1990], or Performing Archaeology [Dima Srouji, 2019]), or trace the survival of memory through cultural traditions like folk songs and storytelling (Al nawws [Majdi El Omari, 1989]), dance (We Ate The Wind [Emily Jacir, 2023]), and agriculture (Foragers [Jumana Manna, 2022]). This project of recuperation, the program suggests, is also one of collective assembly—made possible by bringing together the labors of many across time and place, recombining fragments of sound, image, and gesture, and re-presenting them to viewing publics.

The collectively-made seven-minute short Paesaggio umano (2022), which emerged out of a music and dance workshop led by Emily Jacir, Andrea De Siena, Laura Esposito, and Luca Rossi at Dar Jacir, embodies this spirit of reclamation. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Moataz Zawahreh, who was killed by Israeli snipers on October 13, 2015 while at a protest in front of Dar Jacir. After he was shot, his body was carried through the garden of the house in an effort to rush him to a hospital. Footage of this incident—which appears in Letter to a Friend—was shown to participants during the composition and rehearsal of the dance, whose final performance took place in the same garden. In one section of Paessagio umano, the dancers individually rise from supine positions on the ground and then begin to join in shared movement, evoking the life cycle of emergence and return that Mahmoud Darwish lyrically articulates in “Diary of a Palestinian Wound”: “this land absorbs the skin of martyrs / this land promises wheat and stars.” In the poem, this inseparability of the collective Palestinian body and the land becomes a potent symbol of enduring struggle against occupation: “we and our country are one flesh and bone,” Darwish writes. “We are its wound, but a wound that fights.”

Katie Kirkland is a Brooklyn-based writer and a PhD candidate in film studies and comparative literature at Yale University.