I’m Palestinian American. I was born and raised in the diaspora, but returning to Palestine often to visit my father’s family. My father’s from the West Bank, and he was exiled from Palestine in 1967, so he became a refugee. It took him many years, like the characters in the film, to get foreign citizenship, just to be able to return to visit his homeland and family. And only with the permission, of course, of Israeli authorities. So I grew up going on these trips and seeing him harassed and humiliated at borders and checkpoints.
Suddenly we were making a movie about the Nakba as we were watching a bigger nakba.
More than that, what inspired the movie for me was seeing how the events in Palestine really impacted him over time. In some ways he inspired the character of Sharif, because I watched him, as he got older, get more and more disillusioned, more and more heartbroken, angrier and angrier at the devastating situation back home and the deterioration of his homeland. And I saw his health suffer because of his chronic stress and worry and anger.
I saw the different generations of my family, from my grandfather to my father to my siblings and me. All of us react very differently to what was happening in Palestine, what should happen in Palestine. I always wondered, Why doesn’t the world know how we became refugees, what happened to Palestinians in 1948 in order to create a Jewish majority state? Why doesn’t the world ever get to see the emotional impact and toll of this ongoing nakba on the Palestinian people? And that’s something I witnessed in my own dad, feeling and seeing him become more and more broken over time. I wanted to really show that, because I felt that so often in mainstream media, all that’s shown of us is —
Auteur: Cherien Dabis
