Digging among loot and ruins: cinema in exile and the search for Palestinian audiovisual archives against memoricide
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2446-5240.malala.2024.224575Keywords:
memory, Palestinian cinema, archives, Lebanon WarAbstract
This article reflects on attempts to expropriate, plunder and erase signs from the memory and audiovisual archives of the indigenous Arab-Palestinian population. Between the 1960s and 1980s, exiled Palestinian artists and filmmakers, in Jordan and later in Lebanon, engaged in the production of revolutionary cinema and joined forces so that Palestinian memory would not be lost, vast audiovisual archives of immeasurable value were constituted in the period. With the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, these films remained lost for more than three decades. I seek to map the attempts to recover the remains and fragments of this enormous archive by new generations of Palestinian filmmakers until the final discovery that these and other artifacts and cultural assets were looted and remain under Israeli colonial administration to this day.
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