After almost 40 years in the diaspora, Hind returned to her homeland in the Galilee in 2017 to hold conversations with the feisty community & the mythology of land with a tumultuous past.
She, and a generously talented small team, have been filming a feature documentary in the Galilee ever since, deconstructing mysteries she’s lived with for decades.
Who were the indigenous Palestinian Arab Christian communities there? How do they survive, isolated from the Middle East, after 70 years of locked borders?
Her quest challenges the navigation of “Home”, finds room for her mourning in the valleys of the Galilee, & asks difficult questions on minority faith, the erosion of identity, patriotic allegiance, muddled citizenship & fragmented communal memory after 70 years of occupation and colonization. Who would she be had she lived in the lands of her exiled parents? Why were these people so beautiful? So strong? So alone?
The Poeticians is a performance series I’ve curated and hosted since 2007, across Beirut, Dubai and now in NY. It is an elastic entity, showcasing poetry, prose and music, in at least 50 venues since inception, with dozens of performers contributing.
Since 2014, I have filmed intimate conversations and readings of four Arab women poetesses in specific. What started as an archive gathering project developed into a video art/documentary film that is lyrically literary while incorporating multimedia archive evoking the geopolitical zeitgeists of our histories. The past fifteen years have seen upheaval, violence, fragmentation and chaos in our Levantine region. The constant migration of our cast is a window into these struggles.
The film explores feminist Levantine experiences of love, politics, faith, publishing, finances, censorship, imperial hegemony and sexuality in diaspora.
Blending found footage, digital animation, imagery from extensive family collections, historic archive, regional landscapes, urban streets, interviews, myriad performances, phone social media, personal audiovisual material, fragments of internet comms, the film interrogates their extraordinary/mundane lives, combining observational verite scenes with fantastical poetry-driven sequences of layered scapes.
