Its writer and director, Bolivian filmmaker Sergio Eguino, has said that the media and networks tend to see the victims of the Palestinian conflict as numbers.
Jorge Petinaud Martínez
The leitmotif: five Palestinians, living far from their homeland, narrate their experiences in the face of Israel’s escalating interference and genocide for more than 76 years.
Such life stories, family relationships and friendships, mourning, postponed childhoods, dreams and militancy, are intertwined with the impotence caused by distance, despite the constant support provided by Cuba, and their faith that Palestine will be free.
All this is explained by Eguino, who, referring to the testimonies captured in the film, maintains that ‘Watan writes to Handala in search of strength and consolation, while Omaima converses with the future, without losing sight of the importance of the past and the culture that mothers transmit to their children’.
Another testimony is that of Murid, who speaks of his late grandfather, whose memory spurs him to become a doctor.
Baylasan, meanwhile, shares his life in an account of how he struggles with his words and studies, while longing for a return to the land of his birth and a reunion with his family. Bassel, meanwhile, despite the losses of his father and numerous family members martyred by Zionism, maintains that revolutionaries never die, they multiply.
The feature film, shot in Cuba and based on research by Eguino, Carolina González and Annalie Rueda, is a co-production of Laboratorio Audiovisual Chaski (Chaski Audiovisual Lab) (Bolivia) and Resumen Latinoamericano y del Tercer Mundo (Latin America and Third World Summary) (Cuba-Argentina) with the collaboration of Al-Mayadeen in Spanish (Lebanon).
For Eguino, this documentary marks a turning point in the sense that it is a much more cinematographic project than what he has done so far.
“Although it is all based on real events, the very way we dealt with the testimonies allowed me to dramatically increase the intensity of the message,” he explained.
He pointed out that the five interviewees speak Arabic and Spanish, but their Spanish is not the best, and so a less common dynamic in exhibition documentaries was used. Testimonies were collected from all of them, lasting several hours, and on that basis the director asked them to write a letter to Palestinian people, to comment on their daily lives, to publish poems or to share existing correspondence. “The script was created from this raw material”.
It is a documentary because everything is based on reality, but it has a fictional device, because all the testimonies were reorganised according to the story and the discourse, and these were the moments that were enhanced.
Eguino insisted that the testimonies collected were contrasted with people, with the land, with fictitious characters, and thus the story told in the documentary came together.
Eguino said that small details such as the books in the interviewees’ houses, everyday actions such as planting a plant, making tea or walking through Old Havana are actions that were chosen from the characters’ daily lives, and in the end create a very strong visual metaphor when they talk about their land, their culture and their traditions. The filmmaker told the press that they emphasised the metaphorical because since the start of the Zionist massacres in Gaza on 7 October 2023, there has been a tendency in the media and networks to see the victims of this conflict as numbers. PL
(Translated by Cristina Popa – Email: gcpopa83@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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