[Peace-discuss] Netflix is streaming "Farha" a film with Palestinian characters

[Karen Medina]

This article was brought to my attention by Janet Wesse and I thought I
would share it with Peace-discuss.  It talks about the film "Farha" --about
a Palestinian girl, her father, --- and how Israel was upset that Netflix
is streaming it.  Best regards, -karen medina


Article title: "Jordan's official Oscar entry Farha grants the Palestinian
Diaspora permission to narrate" [in the Middle East Monitor
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20221203-jordans-official-oscar-entry-farha-grants-the-palestinian-diaspora-permission-to-narrate/?fbclid=IwAR2lwino4eojScYJbZp42ekOEpykb7LKsA_O4MN-3fpsDSn04nyXrTSEjnY>
]

by  Dr Suja Sawafta
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/6-author/suja-sawafta/>

























On 1 December [2022], Netflix began streaming* Farha *(2021) worldwide,
despite immense pressure directed at the platform to prevent its debut. The
film is director Darin J. Sallam's first full-length feature and chronicles
the coming-of-age story of its heroine, Farha, a 14-year-old Palestinian
teenager who possesses a voracious appetite for books and learning. Farha's
cultural background is that of a villager – her Arabic dialect infused with
the authenticity often associated with Palestinian grandparents,
particularly the generation born in the decade just before or that of the
Nakba itself. Yet, what makes Farha a distinguished heroine isn't
necessarily her linguistic veracity, it is her bravery and her desire to
pursue her education at a school in the neighbouring city. At the start of
the film, she is seen at one with the land, collecting water from the local
spring, eating figs straight from the communal trees and collecting almonds
in her satchel, still intact and unpeeled. She goes through the motions of
her chores in the village, but her mind often wanders into the literary
worlds of the books she reads, novels gifted to her by her best friend
Fareeda, who is from a city-dwelling family not far from the village from
which Farha hails.

The first scenes of the film show Farha as a dreamer, a girl who urges her
father, a man of mayoral standing, to register her in the city's school.
Her father is hesitant as he believes her economic livelihood is best
secured through the arrangement of marriage and that the local Quran
recitation learning groups provided by the Sheikh are a sufficient
education. Still, Farha fights for her desire to learn and secures the
support of many an ally in her extended family and community to finally
convince her father. On the eve of the Nakba, he signs her enrolment
certificate. Throughout the film, there are peripheral present-absent
signifiers of just how troubling the situation in Palestine has become.
Talk of resistance tactics and meetings between rebels and the officials
hint that the historical events of the Nakba and its tragedy are on the
cusp of eruption. These more politicised characters weave in and out of
frames of the film, infiltrating the scenes with reminders, only to give
way to Farha's experience, which remains at the centre. Slowly but surely,
the viewer's understanding expands organically with Farha's, and we see
that this curious girl, who had very little understanding of the depth of
this dire situation, is forced to contend with its brutality as a witness
and as a survivor of violence, loss and dispossession. In fact, Farha's
father hides her in a closet where she remains trapped throughout the most
violent moments that befall her village, and she is left alone to deal with
the aftermath.

*OPINION: Israel's terror against Gaza's children on Netflix
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211016-israels-terror-against-gazas-children-on-netflix/>*

The film was produced by TaleBox, a production company co-founded by Sallam
<https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4627221/> and producer Deema Azar. Ayah
Jardaneh also served as the producer of the film. The film likewise
received support from Laika Film & Television, Chimney, The Jordan Film
Fund – Royal Film Commission, the Swedish Film Institute and the Red Sea
Film Fund (an initiative of the Red Sea Film Festival). It remains a
largely Jordanian-based initiative, highlighting the lived experience of
Palestine and Palestinians, with support from European-based organisations.
On a political level, *Farha* has depicted the tragedy of the Nakba for the
first time through film and employs what the late Palestinian American
scholar, Edward Said, has called the "permission to narrate" the
Palestinian experience against many odds.

In response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath, Said
penned "Permission to Narrate" for the *Journal of Palestine Studies* in
1984. In it, he notes: "A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in
the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present
Israel in a bad light and for punishing those who try to tell the truth."
In short, Said's argument can be summed up as such: despite declassified
archives, countless human rights reports, international organisation
inquiries and both official and ethnographic accounts of Palestinian plight
and dispossession from Nakba to diaspora and from Nakba to military
occupation, the Palestinians have been denied the right to narrate their
own stories. They have also been denied the privilege of seeing their
experience reflected back at them through film and literature and, by
extension, preventing them from experiencing the catharsis that comes with
artistic acknowledgement and representation. *Farha* has granted the
Palestinian diaspora permission to narrate this story on one of the world's
largest entertainment streaming platforms. More importantly, Farha's story
has been recounted, in numerous iterations and manifestations, 700,000
times by the first generation of the dispossessed. The trauma of that
memory remains forever fixed in the minds of the descendants of those who
were forcibly displaced – a global diasporic population of nearly six
million people and counting – approximately half of the total population of
12 million Palestinians across the historical homeland and outside of it.
This population has been classified by the international community, despite
its many failures towards it, as ipso facto stateless.

[image: Palestinian's culture and heritage is the best weapon against the
Occupation - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]]

Palestinian's culture and heritage is the best weapon against the
Occupation – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

While on the one hand, *Farha* has been hailed by many viewers as an
incredible feat, it comes as no surprise that the film has been targeted by
Israeli officials and has caused outrage. Israel's Finance Minister Avigdor
Lieberman
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20221201-israel-minister-criticises-jordan-film-depicting-brutality-of-israeli-soldiers/>
 issued a statement condemning Netflix
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/30/farha-israel-condemns-new-netflix-film-for-showing-palestinian>,
stating his belief that: "It's crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie
whose whole purpose is to create a false pretence and cite against Israeli
soldiers." Though *Farha* has been screened globally in many film festivals
and series since its debut in 2021, at venues such as Dubai-based Cinema
Akil and intentional film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival,
the Red Sea Film Festival and others, it is its recent reincarnation on
Netflix and its screening at Saraya, a theatre in Jaffa that has caused the
most outrage towards the film. The Israeli government has threatened to act
against Saraya and has encouraged a mass exodus of subscribers to Netflix.
While many regional and international news networks hail the film for its
artistic and historical merits, there is also a cacophony of discordant
opinions about it, with publications like *Fox News* and *The Times of
Israel* labelling the film as "terrible" or as "lies and libels", whilst
other major publishers such as *The New York Times*
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/movies/farha-review.html> tiptoe around
the film's representations, selecting its words carefully to maintain its
readership. Sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have seen an onslaught
of divided reviews: either five-star glowing recommendations from the
film's supporters or comments of rage and disbelief from its detractors.

In all the opinions emerging in the now global conversation surrounding
this film, there has been no mention of Sallam's other smaller work, *The
Parrot*, a 2016 short film she co-directed with Amjad Al-Rasheed. In
eighteen powerful minutes, *The Parrot*
<https://mubi.com/films/the-parrot> follows
the story of a Tunisian Jewish family who arrives in Haifa and takes up
residence in a home belonging to a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox family. Their
clothing, blue-tinted walls and Christian iconography, which borrow heavily
from the aesthetic and colour-scape of local churches, are left behind by
the displaced family. The breakfast and tea on the table are still hot, and
the new occupants, played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabry as Rachel and
Palestinian citizen of Israel Ashraf Barhom as Mousa, are haunted by the
spectre of the family that once lived there and by the constant echoes of
the parrot that was left behind and calls out after the Palestinian boy who
owned him asking for a kiss. The parrot also repeats "where are you?" and
"why are you looking at me like that" incessantly.

*OPINION: Healing with humour, Palestinian comedians strike a chord in
occupied cities
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220831-healing-with-humour-palestinian-comedians-strike-a-chord-in-occupied-cities/>*

Yet, for viewers who are unaware of the Nakba, this imagery and the story
of Palestinian displacement remain subliminal. Instead, what takes centre
stage is the othering of Eastern Jews who find themselves in Euro-Israeli
modernity, one that they can't quite figure out. As such, by the end of the
short film, many viewers would engage in a conversation about the depiction
of an intense encounter between the Tunisian Jewish family and their
Ashkenazi neighbours, who look at the architecture and structure of the
house in Haifa with envy, bewildered at how Eastern Jews, othered and
orientalised, had acquired such luck. The film is as much a critique of
ethnic relations among Israelis as it is about the Palestinian exodus, and,
like *Farha*, it tells a tragic tale through beautifully directed
cinematography and crafted set and costume designs. The pleasing nature of
Sallam's use of pastels, verdure and white stone almost works as an
antidote to the harsh emotional blow to the nerves that her cinematic tales
have delivered thus far and will continue to do in the future.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20221211/a95f3f2e/attachment-0001.htm>