“Palestinian on the Road”: A road trip after Jesus
At the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), and at other foreign festivals, Palestinian directors affirm their loyalty to an indomitable lineage. Even in the worst political, security and production conditions, they manage, as the saying goes, to “spin thread with a donkey’s leg.”
They create films that are faithful to the human condition, avoiding hectoring, cries for help, and pleas for sympathy.
Films are usually attributed to the producing country, but Palestinian filmmakers have forced international recognition of Palestinian cinema, regardless of the producing state or the nationality listed on the passport of its Palestinian director.
In that sense, there is no difference between a director from Gaza banned from visiting Jerusalem, one with a European passport, and a third working under the enemy’s coercion inside the territories occupied since 1948.
There is no difference between Mohamed Bakri, Rashid Masharawi, the Nasser brothers, Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, Cherien Dabis, Annemarie Jacir, Najwa Najjar and Amer Shomali.
Wresting recognition of Palestinian cinema from the jaws of international festival administrations has demanded perseverance and resolve.
Sometimes it has meant echoing Galileo’s “Yet it moves!” when he was forced to bow to an authority that denied the earth’s orbit around the sun and treated scientific truth as a crime. Galileo believed in the future and in the justice of time, and his conviction that “it moves” never wavered.
Palestinian filmmakers have believed the same, resisting the bitterness of seeing their films attributed to this or that state, repeating to themselves: “Still, it moves.” And it did move. Palestinian cinema found its place even before full recognition of the state.
Palestine, too, is a fact, even if its birth certificate is still being withheld.
On Christ’s path of suffering
Palestine had a particular presence at the CIFF. In its 46th edition this month, that presence was confirmed with Palestinian works made by non-Palestinians.
The Nasser brothers’ film “Once Upon a Time in Gaza” won three awards: the Silver Pyramid for best director, the best actor award for its lead Majd Eid, and best Arab feature film.
In the International Critics’ Week competition, Alex Bakri’s film “Habibi Hussein” won the prize for best film.
The audience award went to the film “One More Show,” directed by Mai Saad and Ahmed Al-Danaf.
Outside the competitions, the International Panorama section screened “Palestinian on the Road” by Ismail Habbash. In the film, he follows Christ’s footsteps along the road from Nazareth to Jerusalem, guided by the title of Salman Natour’s book “Palestinian on the Road: From Nazareth to Bethlehem.”
The film, as Habbash has said, is a journey of personal recovery after a loss. But for viewers, it becomes a new journey through the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Christ is no longer the only prophet-martyr. Today, Christ is every Palestinian who endures the experience of military checkpoints, every martyr, and every martyr in-waiting. The Palestinian today is crucified daily on the cross of occupation. The Palestinian deprived of freedom of movement in his own land must walk Christ’s path. That path is now longer than it was, and the people divide its shares of pain among themselves.
The film begins with the personal and soon becomes entangled with the collective. Habbash wanted to accompany his wife, Salam, to Jerusalem for treatment, but he cannot obtain a permit. His wife, who has cancer, dies. Then the permit arrives.
In the film he addresses his late wife, summons her spirit into the journey, and searches for her family’s house, only to find neither house nor family. The family has been scattered, and the features of the place have changed.
The film sets off from the director’s “I” and flows into the “we” of the people.
It does not preach through voice-over.
Instead, it draws us into a visual experience laden with spiritual weight: transformations, myths, and places whose features have been erased. It also celebrates the arts of resistance that keep memory alive.
He visits a theater in the city of Jenin that he frequented more than 20 years ago. One of his comrades was assassinated by the occupation. Another spent years in prison and then got out.
There is a plan to renovate the theater, but part of its land has been carved out for a cemetery for martyrs. The backyard is now a garden where gravestones grow. The martyrs’ tombstones have become witnesses.
Along this long path from Nazareth via Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and other Palestinian towns, to Jerusalem, Habbash asks: What if Christ returned today and made the same journey, all the way to the Via Dolorosa?
How would the Zionists, imported from east and west, treat him?
Christ’s symbolic power lies in his certainty and faith in the face of Rome. He was a peaceful revolutionary.
In today’s tragedy, the country is carved up by military force and the separation wall. The population is monitored by the latest surveillance technologies.
The film suggests that if Christ returned now, he would be the first to rise up.
The road-movie and the everyday
“Palestinian on the Road” belongs to the road-movie genre. Its documentary nature allows it to respond flexibly to the shifts in the journey and the chance encounters along the way.
At a roadside drink stall, a young woman working there speaks about resistance, even if only by insisting on speaking Arabic. Children rehearse songs. They challenge the separation wall with slogans affirming that Palestine remains.
Other spontaneous, animated elements appear, and Habbash refuses to weigh them down with scenes he did not shoot himself, no matter how powerful those images might be. He does not, for example, use footage of the enemy’s bulldozers roaming through the West Bank after Oct. 7, erasing the landmarks of squares named after martyrs and destroying the Yasser Arafat monument in the city of Tulkarm.
The pettiness of revenge and spite has reached the height of absurdity with bulldozers tearing up the asphalt from the streets.
The soft brutality of Zionism
On this difficult journey, the director dispenses with scenes of the continuous incursions. Perhaps he filmed them, then chose to set them aside. He also, very deliberately, avoids filming the enemy.
Yet at every step there are traces of an armed enemy, like a high-voltage current that shocks but cannot be seen. The enemy is beneath the camera’s concern; it appears only as a ghost, running counter to the movement of history. It will vanish when its creators and patrons no longer need its services. They will replace it with another functional entity that costs less, causes less annoyance, and carries a lighter moral burden that they can pretend to bear.
One face of the enemy appears at the end of the film. It is a face that combines three traits that, in theory, might qualify it for a minimal level of humanity, yet it insists on absolute loyalty to Zionism.
She is an elderly, leftist woman, and what she believes sweeps away the illusions of Arab intellectuals who have bet on the Israeli left.
Outside one of the houses, Habbash stands with the Palestinian writer Nasab Adeeb, who came to Jerusalem years ago, fell in love with it and never left.
The director hesitates before stepping into the house; he cannot predict how the experience will end. He wants to knock on the door, and at the same time he hopes no one will open, because every door opens onto a historical wound.
The old woman welcomes them and speaks in English, explaining the architectural style of the house. I almost wrote “her house.” But it is not her house. She is a resident, transient.
On this point Nesab Adeeb asks her: What will you do when the original owners of the house return and demand it back?
The woman does not flare up. She has the finely honed evasiveness of a seasoned diplomat, and she answers with a question, cloaked in historical explanation and dressed up as logic.
Her family is originally Czech, she says, and after the Nazi invasion they left for Palestine. Her family used to own a house in Prague. Is it possible, she asks, after all these decades, for her to go back and demand that whoever lives there now return it to her?
She does not leave the two guests at the door a chance to respond, but hurries on to say that “her” house is wonderful, in its location and its design, and that she has no intention of giving it up.
Habbash leaves the house crestfallen, and so does Nesab Adeeb, who had read signs in the house, among them a copy of the newspaper Haaretz, hinting at the old woman’s leftist leanings.
There is no real difference between right-wing and left-wing Israelis. They are all Zionists.
Nasab tells the director that the woman is completely at peace with herself. She feels no pangs of conscience. The tragedy of the Palestinian victims does not trouble her.
The supposed divide between right and left offers no real ground for hope. The only difference is that voices on the left present Zionism in a softened guise, as though gentler language or cosmetic restraint could alter its essence. Yet wrapping venom in velvet does not change its nature; the poison remains, untouched and undiminished.