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 film is co-produced with Ossama Bawardi from Philistine Films, Belal Hibri from Lucid Post & Nick Zajicek is our camera person. The film has won funding from AFAC & the Gouna Film Festival, & will be completed at the end of 2023.
In the belief that outspoken powerful women can change the configuration of sky to land, rearrange gender roles into obsolescence & alter the future of the region, Hind has been questioning & filming the Poetesses as they roam the world for the past ten years, at least. She intends to create a video-art genre-bending TV series of four episodes, mixing poetry with film with politics with history.
Armed with various cameras, & sometimes helped by kind crews in cities, Hind has joined forces with Rewa Zeinati, Zeina Hashem Beck, Dana Dajani & Farah Chamma to saunter through domestic rituals & career twists in the Levant, the Gulf, Europe & the US. Between them, they encompass the holographic worlds of poets, filmmakers, actresses, writers, teachers, mothers, editors, translators, & lovers.
The multilingual poetesses were brought into this collective through the Poeticians platform, in various ballrooms, bars & shipping containers. The TV series flows through their extraordinary & mundane lives, their unique politics of faith & otherwise, love stories & broken desires in the Arab world, their aspirations, transcendent lines, theatrical presence, silence & bluntness all intertwined.
Using found footage, digital animation, imagery, historic documents, interviews, performances and phone data as well as personal archive, macro photography & fragments of internet landscapes, the series will cover ten years in the lives of these poetesses- all the highs & lows, & the breadth of intimate honest language in between.
