Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

Saturday, March 19 / 1:00pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Amani / Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

This program is presented by the Canada Media Fund.

Feature presentation \

Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

2021 / 89 minutes / France
Director: Abdallah Al-Khatib
Writer: Abdallah Al-Khatib
Language: Arabic
Subtitles: English
Content warning: War imagery, death
Guanajuato International Film Festival 2021, Best International Documentary Feature
Hamburg Film Festival 2021, Best Film
São Paulo International Film Festival 2021, New Directors Competition
Torino Film Festival 2021, Gandhi's Glasses Award
Visions du Réel Festival International de Cinema Nyon 2021, Interreligious Award
War on Screen International Film Festival 2021, Press Jury Award
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2021, Ogawa Shinsuke Prize

first feature \ human rights \ current affairs

Abdallah Al-Khatib’s first feature takes viewers through the streets of Yarmouk, a district in Damascus, Syria which sheltered the biggest Palestinain refugee camp for over 60 years. The Assad regime saw the district as a refuge of rebels and resistance, blocking all routes in and out in 2013, depriving the inhabitants of food, water, medicine, electricity and contact with the outside world.

Weaving displacement, hunger and bloodshed into compassion, music, love and joy, this harrowing documentary frames distant narratives into familiar ones. This poetic “love letter” to the people of Yarmouk gracefully captures the resilience, hopefulness and beauty of a strained community amid the ugliness of the siege.

Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege was part of the 2021 ACID programme at Cannes.

- Azarin Sohrabkhani

Short film \

Amani

2020 / 17 minutes / French with English subtitles
Director: Alliah Fafin
*Content Warning: War imagery*
In this tale, halfway between reality and fantasy, a mysterious narrator tells us the story of Amani, a young boy passionate about dance. Amani’s innocence and joie de vivre open the narrator’s eyes to the humanity he had never really cared about before. But as the night begins to rumble, Amani’s joie de vivre disappears to give way to his pain, which echoes in the silence of the plain.