Dir. Khaled Jarrar
2023, Palestine/Germany/Qatar, 80 min
Arabic and German with English subtitles
The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? Notes on Displacement takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity is palpable.
Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.
Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he—along with the viewer— becomes a true member of this family.
Plays with
Signal and Noise, Dir. Jess Shane, 2022, Canada, 14 min
What are the sounds of Guantánamo Bay Detention Center? In 2015, poet Jordan Scott set out to record the ambient sounds of the prison as a means of bypassing its strict media censorship rules. Today, former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, recalls how sound shaped his experiences there— both of torture and of hope. 20 years after the founding of the prison, Scott’s field recordings and Adayfi’s memories come together to create a visceral new landscape of this notoriously secret place.
