Al Dhakira al Khasba (Fertile Memory) (Michel Khleif, 1980) FR-EN sub

Grandmother Romia fights an unending legal battle with the Zionist authorities who confiscated her ancestral land soon after the Israeli occupation in 1947. With her family scattered all over the globe while she works in an Israeli factory, Romia doggedly maintains a dignity and passion that for her are the difference between mere subsistence and tenacious survival. Sahar Khalifeh, a divorced novelist and young mother living in the West Bank, struggles to maintain a modern role for herself within her increasingly intolerant occupation community. Representing both contemporary Arab womanhood and vanguard Palestinian conscience, Sahar must balance the changes in her world after the Six Day War with the changes in herself after achieving personal emancipation. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121278 The first full-length film to be shot within the ‘Green Line’ of the occupied territories, the film blends both documentary and narrative elements in order to craft portraits of two very different women: Farah Hatoum, a 50-year-old widow living in the city of Nazareth, and Sahar Khalifeh, a divorcee living with her daughter in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “We can only reach the truth by denouncing the logic and the systems that transform us into potential tormentors and victims. That is how I decided to make a film for - and not about - the women of Palestine, and through them, a film for Palestine. In Fertile Memory, Palestine - its history, its reality, its future, and its contradictions - appear through the portraits of two women, who are almost marginal in the eyes of society, a widow and a working woman. They become the archetype of their people’s experiences. Here was how a subdued history oppresses half of its population. Fertile Memory was for me the vision of the present towards the past for a better future. I tried to push the real scenes from daily life towards fictionality, by exploring the women’s external and internal worlds. I had to suppress the boundaries between reality and fiction, document and narration. Is not Palestine the essence of the mythical country, in spite of its reality?” (Michel Khleifi)