Masarat

The Museum of the Cinema is proposing a retrospective of the work of film-maker Michel Khleifi, who continues to show the wounds of his people through fiction and documentary films. In his first feature-length film La mémoire fertile, Michel Khleifi told the history of his people, adopting a poetic metaphorical approach combined with the rigour of a documentary. In Michel Khleifi’s work, the idea of frontiers, separation but also therefore union, is omnipresent. As the cinema is capable of bringing down frontiers and providing a certain credibility to the word ‘ peace ’, the keys to understanding his films is in the celebration of union. In Noce en Galilée where Israeli soldiers mingle at the wedding of a Palestinian couple. In Cantique des pierres, where a couple is broken by the arrest of the man and the emigration of the woman, but is reunited many years later. Union finally in Route 181, which could be seen as a true act of cinematographic faith, since the film is codirected by a Palestinian film-maker (Michel Khleifi) and an Israeli film-maker (Eyal Sivan) and follows the road which runs alongside the frontiers fixed by resolution 181, adopted in 1947 by the United Nations, and which separated the two nations.

06.10 - 20:15 

La Mémoire fertile

Michel Khleifi

Documentary

Belgique, 104', 1980, V.O. st BIL.

Farah Hatoum, 50 years old, lives in Nazareth in Galilee. Sahar Khalifeh, a young Palestinian novelist from Ramallah lives in the occupied West Bank. Despite their great differences, both are confronted by the same Israeli occupation and same obstacles facing women in Arab societies.