Origin: Palestine | Documentary | Director: Shira Wolfe | 0 minutes

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Tracing Darwish
A journey through (seemingly lost) Palestinian spaces is at once a road movie, a video poem and an exploration in psychogeography. The movie traces the footsteps of Mahmoud Darwish, searching for his village Al Birwa, as well as the filmmaker’s own experiences in Palestine. Though Al Birwa no longer physically exists, the space where it used to be still carries its stories and histories, and it is this fascination with the different layers of space, and the power that poetry has to recall past spaces, that inspired this project.
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The movie was created by Shira Wolfe in 2016, with voice-overs by Gráinnemir Amir Abualrob.

Shira Wolfe (she/her) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch-American writer and poet with a background in theatre. In 2015, she acted in a play in Jenin during a collaboration between Transversal Theater Company and The Freedom Theatre. One year later, she returned to Palestine to shoot a movie inspired by the poet Mahmoud Darwish—her graduation project for the MA in International Performance Research, which was supported by the Lutfia Rabbani Foundation. Shira has worked with refugee communities in Belgrade and is currently working with asylum seekers in the Netherlands through art foundation De Vrolijkheid. She leads art and poetry workshops which are centred around the power of multilingualism. Since 2023, Shira has also been working with The Mystifiers, a socially engaged music collective in Amsterdam. Her debut poetry collection will be published in January 2025 by The New Menard Press.

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