After almost 40 years in the diaspora, Hind returned to her homeland in the Galilee in 2017 to hold conversations with the feisty community and 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, and asks difficult questions on minority faith, the erosion of identity, patriotic allegiance, muddled citizenship and 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 film organically weaves the differing existences of diverse characters with the ethos of the Galilee in its myriad layers of thoughts, sensations and memories interconnected in the daily life of these rooted communities. We follow these exuberant people to mountainous landscapes, ancient ruins and temples, chasing Mediterranean sunsets, riding horses through valleys, and tending to the delicate ecosystem of this complex, contradictory and difficult yet magical place.
The ensemble film journeys through olive harvest seasons, through joyous dancing at weddings, into ancient rites at its many churches, into the homes of families celebrating perseverance and the best damn food we ever tasted.
The film speaks to their identity; What they choose to name themselves, and what they hold on to, after so much had been taken.
The film is co-produced with the fab Ossama Bawardi from Philistine Films, and Nick Zajicek is our super camera person. AFAC has funded the production phase and the film is entering post production in 2020.
In the belief that outspoken powerful women can change the configuration of sky to land, rearrange gender roles into obsolescence and alter the future of the region, Hind has been following and filming the Poetesses as they roam the world for the past ten years, at least.
Armed with various cameras, and sometimes helped by kind crews in cities insistent on honoring poetry, Hind has joined forces with Rewa Zeinati, Zeina Hashem Beck, Dana Dajani and Farah Chamma to saunter through domestic rituals and career twists throughout the Middle East, the Gulf, Europe and the US. Between them, they encompass the holographic worlds of poets, filmmakers, actresses, writers, teachers, mothers, editors, translators, and lovers.
The multilingual poetesses were brought into this collective through the Poeticians platform, where they performed together in various ballrooms, bars and shipping containers. The film flows through ten years of their extraordinary and mundane lives, their unique politics of faith and otherwise, love stories and broken desires in the Arab world and beyond, their aspirations, transcendent language, theatrical presence, silence and bluntness all intertwined in a multimedia experimental video-art poetry documentary series that Hind is building, slowly but surely.
