A programme of two films from female filmmakers made during the Palestinian revolution followed by a Q&A with directors Arab Loutfi and Layaly Badr, chaired by filmmaker and founder of The Void Project, Azza El Hassan.

In Layaly Badr’s documentary short, Road to Palestine, seven-year-old Layla – who has been badly injured in an air raid – lives in a refugee camp outside Palestine. Layla and her friends describe how they imagine Palestine, despite never having seen it.

Director Arab Loutfi describes the impetus behind the making of her documentary feature, The Upper Gate (Bawabat Al-Fawqa): When I returned to Sidon in 1983, it had just been occupied. My sister destroyed several documents in a panic because the Zionist soldiers were coming, and I lost many of my mementoes. Friends were killed, and places I had loved were destroyed. I wanted to capture memories that could not be destroyed. The city had survived, and many people I knew were still living there and taking stock of their losses. Actually, everyone in the documentary was someone I loved, and so the film was in many ways an extended form of my memory.

Programme:

The Upper Gate (Bawabat Al-Fawqa), dir. Arab Loutfi, Palestine 1991, 90 min., Arabic with English subtitles

Road to Palestine, dir. Layaly Badr, Germany 1985, 7 min., Arabic with English subtitles