Origin: Palestine | Documentary | Director: Raafat Hattab | 7 minutes

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While Hattab’s Houria locates freedom in the sexless mermaid, whose human anatomy is truncated from the waist down, his “Bride of Palestine” alter ego uses gender as a tool to problematize political oppression.

Houriah weaves together the stories of Hattab and his grandmother Yousra to reflect on fluid modes of belonging. Yousra was expelled from her village Jamaseen Al-Garbi by Zionist paramilitary groups in 1948, and she remains witness to the decline of Jaffa’s glory where she resettled after the Nakba. On the other hand, Hattab, presented as a hybrid mermaid and a symbol of the shores of Manshiyyeh (North of Tel Aviv), embodies both the liminality of those who were driven out of Palestine and the longing desire to belong to the Palestinian nation.

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