THE SHIP OF EXILE + HERE AND ELSEWHERE - ALFILM Arab Film Festival Berlin

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Double Feature: The Ship Of Exile + Here And Elsewhere

The Ship of Exile

Documentary, director: Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon/France, 1982, 17 min., Arab./Fr. with En. ST

The dock of a ship on the waters of the Mediterranean becomes a halt of peace for the wandering Palestinian leader in his quest for liberation. After living clandestinely in Beirut, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, was pressured to leave Lebanon for a new exile in Tunis, across Greece. He talks about his destiny, his journey and the future of the PLO. Saab was the only journalist with a camera admitted to accompany him on the boat.

Here and Elsewhere

Documentary, directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, France, 1976, 53 min., Fr./Arab./Ger./Rus. with En. ST

The massacre of Black September 1970 had brought Godard’s film project Jusqu'à la Victoire or Until Victory in support of the Arab cause in Palestine and in collaboration with the Palestine Film Unit to an ultimate end. Four years later, Godard decided to delve into the material he shot during his visits to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan and, with the help of his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, tell a different story. Conceding to the gap between reality and representation, revolutionary ambitions, and political practices, Godard and Miéville weave the footage of Palestinian combatants through their struggles elsewhere together with the everyday life of a French family in the here and now. “The whole world is too much for one image,” they assert in a polyvalent essay that relocates the Palestinian question within Europe’s history of violence and reflects on defeat, on the contingencies of narration, and the limits of the image. 

Followed by a Film Talk with Film Expert Rula Shahwan.