Keyword Palestinian Diaspora

“Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage.” Aisha Azzam and her husband started their family grain mill in Baqa’a refugee camp, Jordan, 35 years ago. She treasures her role in safeguarding culture by milling the wheat, grains, and herbs essential to Palestinian cuisine. Through food, Aisha traces the story of Palestinian displacement and rebuilding family and community in a refugee camp. Harvesting, milling, cooking, and feasts ground the film’s arc of displacement, longing, and resistance. In Aisha’s words, “Food is what keeps us together as Palestinians.” Aisha’s Story intimately captures the loss, beauty, and steadfastness that define Palestinian lives.

An intimate, and often humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family in the lives of those for whom dispossession is the norm, and yearning their daily lives.

A 42 minute documentary film that combines the cactus and the memories it stands for. The film addresses the story of the destruction of the Palestinian villages of Latroun in the Occupied West Bank and the forcible transfer of their civilian population in 1967. Over 40 years later, the Israeli occupation continues, and villagers remain displaced. The film follows two separate but parallel journeys. Aisha Um Najeh takes us down the painful road that Palestinians have been forcefully pushed down, separating them in time and place from the land they nurtured; while Israelis walk freely through that land, enjoying its fruits. The stems of the cactus, however, take a few of them to discover the reality of the crime committed.

In June 1967, hostilities broke out between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It is reported that over 300,000 people were rendered homeless, including some 120,000 Palestine refugees. Again, many left with only what they could carry on their back. They lost their homes, their land, their family and their whole lives.