The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs in person across various venues from October 18 through October 27. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.
LYD (2023) dir. Sarah Ema Friedland & Rami Younis
This is my third year covering the Boston Palestine Film Festival for the Boston Hassle. I’ve seen almost every feature film put on by the festival in that time, and that makes for a hefty quantity of documentaries. Lyd is probably the best of these docs. It’s also an imaginative statement-making film that flips through speculative history to find a brave new reality where Palestinians are free and Jewish immigration to Palestine occurs peaceably and even welcomely instead of through ethnic cleansing and war.
Science fiction and documentary aren’t genres that often mingle. It’s a combination that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. Lyd, co-directed by Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis, makes a feast of it. The documentary comes from the voice of the city of Lyd. And I mean voice literally: the city narrates its own story — from the once de facto first capital of Palestine through nakba and to refugee camp — through the voice of actress Maisa Abd Elhadi. They once had an international airport that connected Palestine to the larger world; now, they are prisoners to another state. Their existence itself is policed. Archival footage never seen before shows the elite Israeli Palmach soldiers that once ethnically “cleansed” (language they actually use) the city recollecting on the atrocity many years later, though some of them still think of what they did as a “liberation” instead of a war crime.
This horrific past realizes the present historical conditions where many of the other interviews come from: the descendants of those once forced to flee (or killed), or the handful of Arabs allowed to stay in the city to maintain its infrastructure. The identities of those who stayed exist mostly in the memory of the elders. In one classroom, Friedland and Younis observe a geography lesson, a classroom of Palestinian children fail to successfully locate the land they call home. “[It’s in] South Asia,” one student’s shouting falls on the pained ears of their teacher. The past and present connect fluidly in the editing room, and that’s a great shame to history that it does. This is a living document of the erasure of identity.
The science fiction comes into place with an animated alternate reality. Lyd imagines a reality where the Arab states successfully defended their land and created a greater Arab nation with three independently functioning states within the borders: Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. The timeline is no utopia, nor is it a whitewashing of Arab land (see the other timeline for that), but it’s certainly better than the present. Two characters discuss going to an academic conference on equity for minorities in Syria, another time we see a joyous festival for their patron St. George. The filmmakers deny this alternate dreamscape, though. Ruptures in reality open windows between the animated world and the real one; the fantasy can only continue so far before going on a dangerous (and pointless) journey of alternate history and the director duo always seems to know exactly when to pull the plug, shocking the viewer back into the violent present.
The Christian St. George looms over past and present, live-action and animated. According to Christian tradition, he’s buried in the city of Lyd (or Lod, as the Israelites changed it), and in its golden days, Christians would flock to the city to celebrate Eid Lyd in a festival commemorating St. George. He’s not just a symbol for the Christians of the city though; the Muslims too look up his story of slaying the dragon for inspiration. The Palestinians rally behind the saint as an anti-colonial symbol. In exile and stuck in Balata, a refugee town in the West Bank, the former residents can only reminisce. “We would celebrate their holiday together,” a Muslim woman edifies her granddaughter.
Despite the film’s recent ban in Israel (including a police shutdown of a screening), I was pleasantly surprised by how the filmmakers imagine a reality inclusive of Jews, in need of a state following global oppression. The proposition for a better reality does not flip one ethno-state into another. On one level, this isn’t surprising. Lyd is co-directed by an American Jew and a Palestinian; on another level, it is surprising that they didn’t take the easy route — finding some excuse to put an end to Jews moving to the Levant, likely peacefully — but rather they found a way to reframe that interaction from settler colonialism to neighborly hospitality. The easier option would have been to search for an alternate reality without Jewish migration to the land of Palestine. Friedland & Younis are brave for this. And that the state of Israel would ban such an imaginative and humane film tells me all I need to know about the Israeli Ministry of Culture. They see Lyd as a danger not because it questions a Jewish migration to the Levant but because it dares to speculate on a confidently multi-ethnic state of Palestine.
THREE PROMISES (2023) dir. Yousef Srouji
In most of the world, children cannot quickly discern the difference between missiles, motor shells, and sound bombs, let alone respond appropriately to each. This is not the case in the occupied territories of Palestine. The children in this part of the world do know those differences, and their knowledge of the categories of violence might one day be the difference between life and death. Such knowledge is so mundane to Palestinians in the West Bank that it finds its way onto the family footage of first-time documentarian Yousef Srouji’s childhood in the midst of Israel’s retaliation to the Second Intifada.
Srouji as an adult comes across his mother’s home recordings of that time, and these are stitched together with reflections from the present. His mother, Suha, sometimes lies to her children about not recording when, very clearly, she is; sometimes the two kids are asleep and she finds the resolve to film her private worries with her husband, Ramzi, about the armed conflict outside their windows. Srouji the director mostly lets the footage self-exorcise its demons. Why does she feel compelled to record, and to what end? How can a family show each other tenderness with bombs being dropped outside? How does a parent of occupation explain the reality of their oppression to their kids?
The look of the footage differs only in slight details. The lighting is about the only thing that changes consistently, along with the date watermark in the bottom right. The watermark adds both a tangible familiarity to the videos and burns the historical moment of the Second Intifada onto the family footage. It’s also a reminder that what would have been the innocent documentation of a family maturing in another place and time in the world lost indefinitely to the ghosts of time is, in this case, a first draft of history.
The most shocking aspects of Srouji’s life are all shocking because of their mundaneness. His cousin comes over and talks about the shrapnel he’s collected from the last missile strike that hit their home the same way that North American children talk about collecting Pokemon cards. Mother and father debate if the red lights they see are from the gunfire in the distance, possible missiles, or, more hopefully, an ambulance in transit. Ramzi reads Harry Potter to the kids as explosions cloud the background noise. Most heartbreakingly, an innocent Yousef asks, “Mom, why did the Israelis occupy Palestine?” She responds with, “I’ll tell you when I stop filming,” an admission of her own awareness of the camera and its role in resisting occupation.
Three Promises
2023
dir. Yousef Srouji
61 min.
Lyd
2023
dir. Sarah Ema Friedland & Rami Youniss
78 min.
Lyd screens Sunday, 10/20, 7:00pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre. Three Promises screens for free Monday, 10/21, 7:00pm @ MassArt Design & Media Center. Click here for ticket info and additional screenings.
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
