Palestinian cinema has been cursed by memory from its very inception. Since the first Palestinian fiction film in production, Holiday Eve, was interrupted by the Nakba of 1948, its fate left unknown, the scale of the Israeli occupation and the destruction wrought against Palestinian society has been an inescapable aspect of filmmaking within the nation’s boundaries. Attempts have been made to make great films wholly outside the constant dynamics of war and suffering, such as Nadine Labaki’s Caramel in Lebanon, but these ventures in Palestinian filmmaking are few and far between — if they truly exist at all. How can one make a film that attempts to avoid depicting what is ever-present and inescapable?
Lyd, directed by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland, is an attempt to circumvent this inescapability, not by ignoring the occupation, rather by facing it head-on, and looking beyond it. Dreams of what Palestine could be have always been an ever-present element of cinema by and about Palestinians, such as Mohammad Malas’ aptly-named film The Dream, but rarely is it given materialization. In Lyd, Younis and Friedland imagine an alternate history where the city of Lyd never came under Israeli control, where the Nakba never happened to begin with. Instead, a successful uprising against European colonization and the Sykes-Picot agreement creates a pan-Levantine confederation, one in which Palestine is a free country alongside its Arab neighbors. Jewish refugees from Europe are welcomed with open arms but they are integrated into a society that is unequivocally Palestinian, where different faiths are respected, and different peoples get along without strife.
The animation is dreamlike and colorful, drawing a world in which the concerns of its people are not home demolitions or wars, but academic conferences and holiday celebrations. It is warm and inviting, yet there is a deep grief underlying its presentation — a terror which beats at its walls with the reminder that it is not real.
In essence, this film is a documentary about present-day Lyd, its current issues among the Palestinian community that remained after the Nakba, and the tensions it has with the modern Israeli settler population. Younis and Friedland acquire fantastic footage and great interviews, illustrating a story that rises well above other contemporary examples of the docudrama genre.
An inevitable, if perhaps tired, comparison arises when discussing an animated film about Palestine: the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir. Both are films which employ animation to represent the unrepresentable, utilizing imagination to escape from cruel realities into the bliss of fictional vistas. However, Lyd’s treatment of the material differs in a crucial way from Ari Folman’s, one that may prevent it from receiving the same international accolades Bashir did. This film is not an exoneration, it is a searing indictment.
Archival footage creeps into the finale of Waltz with Bashir to showcase the terrifying aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The emotional catharsis of the film is that Folman, who served in the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) at the time, realizes that he only lit the flares that allowed the massacre to take place. He is comforted upon recognizing that he didn’t actually participate directly, and he was ignorant of the mass killings which occurred.
In Lyd, we are treated to archival footage of the Palmach veterans who committed massacres in the Palestinian city in 1948 who offer similar claims as Folman. The film features endless interviews of soldiers who claim that they are unsure of whether bad things occurred during the siege. The soldiers state that there were no women and children among the victims, and they didn’t engineer an ethnic cleansing while simultaneously describing a mass deportation of an ethnicity. One former soldier attempts to claim he had an epiphany, realizing he was inflicting the same horror as antisemites did to the Jews in Europe, after a Palestinian resident begged him for mercy in Yiddish, only to reveal that he simply left the mosque where the massacre was occurring without taking any other action. As he attempts to explain himself, an Israeli voice off-screen asks with almost sneering contempt, “What, are you a pacifist now?”
The testimonies of those who survived the massacres, the victims of the IOF barely given space of their own in Israeli cinema, are without stop here. Palestinians who were forced to flee, now old, blind, and decrepit, recount the horrors they witnessed and what others around them did to survive the siege on their city. Their stories are relentless, and crucially, told without a dangerously kitsch attempt at dramatic recreation.
The animation, despite it being a selling point for the film, is limited, intentionally acting as the picture’s emotional center. We are only given tastes of that alternate history and hypothetical present, where Palestine is a prosperous nation-state with problems outside of occupation, and where its real-life subjects are able to live normal lives in their city of origin. The poetic narration of Lyd reminds us that this is just a fantasy. The reality of what lies within the borders of 1948, what Lyd is like within present-day Israel, continues to push up against that fantasy until it literally tears through the painted frames, however bright, shiny, and sunny they may be.
The shots we are treated to of the reality of Lyd, or Lod as the Israelis now have deemed it, evokes Masao Adachi’s treatment of cityscapes, the Japanese New Wave filmmaker who eventually joined the PFLP. Adachi’s “landscape theory” postulated that the political structure of the ruling power could be analyzed through one’s ordinary surroundings. This theory was honed by what he saw and filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. While Lyd is no experimental communist film, the analyses of these power structures through its landscape shots are no less potent.
High-rise structures with fine finishes, built solely for Jewish settlers, tower over Palestinian protesters. Signs for Israeli businesses, appropriating the produce of Palestinian land and aspects of Palestinian culture, affix themselves to buildings that predate Zionist settlement. A mosque where hundreds of Palestinians were massacred bears a reminder of the killings that happened within on a small sign in Arabic outside. Directly in front of the mosque is a sign denoting that it is “Palmach Square”, named for the elite unit who slaughtered them. Everywhere bears the jagged marks of Israeli colonization. New Israeli trains pass through on railroads that once carried people from Cairo to Beirut. Ramshackle structures jut up from the earth, the houses of Palestinians whose original dwellings are being constantly demolished. Wide, empty patches of dirt denote spaces where Palestinian architecture used to exist, where the municipality would rather there be nothing than there be reminders of original residents.
Every so often throughout the film, the disembodied, poetic voice of Lyd throughout history, represented by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, speaks. At first, she speaks blissfully about the beauty of the city, but as the documentary continues, she becomes more desperate and bitter, lamenting stinging truths: the utopia that many Palestinians imagine their homes to be, within the borders of ‘48, is not so. So much has been lost, so much has been bulldozed by the occupier. It has been permanently scarred. While the animated future depicts the lavish campus of a fictional George Habash University and a pluralistic, perfect society, Lyd’s voice knows deep down this cannot be so. All she wants is a city that can exist without shame, where its homes cannot be destroyed, where its people can live with some ounce of dignity.
The utopia Lyd envisions is special because it is self-aware. It knows the value of maintaining Palestine’s story against all odds, against the waves of reality, because the alternative of accepting Israeli occupation, of accepting Zionist colonization of both mind and space, is too devastating to bear, and from there, there can be no changing the course of the future. From that point, it can be written that the destiny of Palestine will always be in the hands of the occupier, and not the occupied.
As Maisa’s voice says as the film draws to a close: “If we don’t imagine, we will end up in someone else’s world.”
