Between Heaven and Earth (2019)
Origin: Palestine, Iceland, Luxembourg | Fiction | Director: Najwa Najjar | 92 minutes
Between Heaven and Earth (2)
by Najwa Najjar, fiction 92 min. Palestine, Iceland, Luxembourg 2019
Salma and Tamer have been married for five years and are living in the Palestinian Territories. The first time Tamer gets permission to pass through the Israeli checkpoint is to ask for a divorce. Once arrived at the courtroom the couple uncovers an unwelcome surprise from the past of Tamer’s father.
There is no room for normal life in an abnormal context. That’s what the filmmaker wants to prove in her movie. When you are visiting your homeland for the first time in your 40’ies, how can you be sure you know all about your past? Love, marriage, brotherhood and even your affection for others need to be reconsidered.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=YZD9zYQ1JWY&feature=emb_logo
Cinema under Occupation: A Discussion with Palestinian Director Najwa Najjar
By Thomas Pinn On Nov 17, 2022
As a leading figure in Palestinian cinema, Najwa Najjar has written and directed numerous films that reflect the trials and tribulations of living under an occupation and open a space for Palestinians to narrate their own story. Among numerous other awards, her 2014 film Eyes of a Thief was Palestine’s nomination for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and her 2019 film Between Heaven and Earth won the Naguib Mahfouz Best Screenplay award at the 41st edition of Cairo International Film Festival. Najwa was in town for the Cairo International Film Festival, so we thought we’d sit down with her to ask her about the importance of Palestinian directors being able to represent themselves in cinema, the struggles of filming under occupation in Palestine, and what she’s most looking forward to seeing at the Cairo International Film Festival
Through film, some countries are able to write their own narratives and be the ones representing themselves. Is it usually Palestinians themselves who get to represent themselves to the wider world?
For many, many years, our narrative has actually been told by everyone but ourselves. We’ve been cast into stereotypes. It’s been done in a way that kind of relegated our country, us, who we are, what happened to us, and it casted everything as a religious conflict not a national conflict. We have been stripped of any humanity and if you watch anything from Hollywood, the way they see us, the way that Palestine is depicted, it is a way that is so inhuman. So yes, Palestinians over the years and with great difficulty are reclaiming their narratives. After 1948, there were people that were taking pictures, photographs, making cinema, making documentaries, and then it started going into fictional movies and shooting on the ground. It’s a way to have our say, break stereotypes, and reclaim our narrative, and show our country as we see it.
Do Arabs more generally similarly face misrepresentations in cinema? And if so, what do you think this stems from?
I think in general, there has been a process of dehumanising Arabs. There is the relegation of every issue to Islamic terrorism. This by itself overlooks the people who have been living here forever, like the Christians who have been living here in the region, and others. Either you’re a terrorist, or you’re a victim, or you’re a wife beater, and it’s like come on, enough. Look at most Hollywood movies and there’s no conversation, there’s nothing that is remotely attractive, even the way that they look, the way that they dress, everything really.
Did any of these concerns initially lead to you become a film maker?
It was the main thing that led me. I did grow up in a household full of music and my father taught me how to use a camera. He was a journalist at one point in his life and my mother’s a huge lover of music. I also read a lot of books and there were a lot of books in the house, so that combination kind of led me to cinema. And then, studying politics and economics, I thought I could either complain or do something about it, and for me the weapon was cinema.
Your films have spoken about love, divorce, expression, family, and many other issues, but behind all of them is the ever-present occupation of Palestine hanging in the background as a constant reminder. Why is this?
In 1948, my mother, father, and 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and forced to live as refugees. In 1967, more people were pushed out of their homes, another 300,000 or more. There has been a systematic ethnic cleansing that has been going in Palestine since 1948. It’s constant, it’s daily, it’s everything that we see from a 750 kilometre wall that took our water, although its about more than water, and its about a fifteen-year-old girl who was getting bread for her children two days ago and she was shot. Its my friend’s son, a sixteen-year-old boy that goes to a Quaker school and whose mother is the head of Yabous, which is a cultural centre in Jerusalem, and her husband heads the national music conservatory. The sixteen-year-old son has been imprisoned for the past six weeks. Put aside that there’s nothing on him, this is one and half months of a kid’s education, this is something that disrupts their lives, and the parents were both arrested for supposed tax reasons two years ago. The whole concept of what is happening to this family, and what is happening to them is representative of many families, is that you are not allowed to have culture and you are not allowed to have life in Palestine. I also was not allowed to go into the country for a while. It’s not complicated, it’s actually pretty black and white because simply, we live under occupation. The occupation needs to end because this is unjust and as filmmakers we try to survive, we try to show our story,
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