More than a dozen films centered on the fraught history of Palestine and the displacement of its people are to be screened at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) in Taipei and New Taipei City from Friday next week to May 10.
As part of this year’s festival, the “Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive" program is to feature 14 documentaries by filmmakers who have charted the development of Palestine.
Many of the directors in the program drew on archives capturing Palestine's turbulent history, TIDF programmer Chen Wan-ling (陳婉伶) said.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival
As a national film archive, the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) — the main organizer of the biennial event — focuses on the presence and absence of "a nation's visual records" and how such status is tied to the memories of the people, she said.
While the program was inspired by similar art initiatives overseas against the backdrop of "international circumstances," the TFAI has no intention of weighing in on geopolitics, and instead aims to showcase Palestinian cinema, Chen said.
The directors featured reworked archival material by disrupting its original narrative, painting over the film, repeating certain segments or altering the speed of footage, Chen said.
They then wove the treated archives into their own works and layered the visuals with other sounds, she said.
By reconstructing and reimagining the archives imbued with memories, the filmmakers "resisted oblivion" and "reclaimed their agency" through their documentaries, she said.
Mohanad Yaqubi's R21 aka Restoring Solidarity, which examines how 20 copies of Palestinian films and archives made their way to Japan and were later obtained by the Palestinian filmmaker when the originals were long believed lost, is a prime example.
Meanwhile, director and anthropologist Diana Allan's Partition revisits the watershed moments of British rule in the region between 1920 and 1948, as well as the Nakba, Chen said, referring to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Frustrated by high licensing fees for Palestine-related archives held by British institutions, Allan "reconstructed the images in her own way" using low-resolution clips found online, interview excerpts from Nakba survivors and footage from Lebanese refugee camps, Chen said.
Dancing Palestine by filmmaker Lamees Almakkawy follows three young Palestinians in the UK as they learn traditional dance through online videos, seeking to "use their bodies as a vessel and restore culture to themselves," she said.
The 10-day festival is to showcase 134 documentaries from more than 40 countries at the TFAI headquarters in New Taipei City, and Shin Kong Cinemas Taipei Lion's, SPOT-Huashan and C-Lab in Taipei, along with director talks and forums on Palestinian cinema.
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