The documentary of Abdallah al-Khatib, turned during the seat by the regime of Assad, is filmed as an intimate newspaper.
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From the torture inflicted in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East, located in the suburbs of Damascus, besieged and hungry by the ASSAD regime between 2013 and 2018, Western public opinion has virtually nothing . While most stages of the descent into the Undergrounds of Syria have been amply documented, in the collective memory, the Calvary of Yarmouk boils down to an appalling but unique scene, seized by the United Nations in January 2014: that of a Indigent tide come together to eat in a landscape of Apocalypse.
The Palestinian documentary Abdallah al-Khatib, Little Palestine, offers a magical response to this iconographic deficit. Turned on site, between 2013 and 2015, before the camp goes under the Cup of the Islamic State Organization (EI), it is woven of sequences that take place upstream and downstream of the famous photo of 2014. The film is designed not as a journalistic investigation but as an intimate newspaper, a meditation on the human experience of the headquarters. It reconstructs a perditional memory, most of the survivors of Yarmouk being scattered today around the world, and restores a resistance narrative, long scrambled by intrapalatinal divisions on the subject and by the anti-terrorist propaganda of the Syrian regime. . In 2018, he completely shaved the camp, in the name of the fight against jihadists, while allowing them to run away into the desert.
“Survival Act”
When Abdallah Al-Khatib, a young Fatah activist, the main Palestinian nationalist training, begins to film, in 2013, he was twenty-five, Yarmouk, unofficial camp, created in 1957, south of Damascus, Who gradually took the form of a trader district perfectly integrated into the capital, turned into a nasse. After its conquest by rebel groups, including elements of the Al-Nosra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, the regular army locked all the outings. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are trapped and start wandering in the streets of the camp looking for food. One hundred and eighty of them will succumb to hunger in the months that followed, in addition to the hundreds of deaths caused by the bombings and shots of Snipers. The distress of the population is such that an Imam proclaims in October 2013 that it is halal (lawful) to eat dogs.
“The act of filming, even before it becomes a way of documenting this story, was for me an act of survival, a way of preserving my psychological balance,” says Abdallah al-Khatib, attached to Berlin, where he got political asylum. In Yarmouk’s headquarters, the young director discerns the echo of two other Palestinian tragedies: the headquarters of the Such Al-Zaatar camp in 1976, by the Maronite factions of Lebanon, and that of Camp Chatila, between 1985 and 1987, by The Shiite Militia Amal.
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