Farha tells the true story of a young Palestinian girl surviving the Nakba in 1948 by hiding in a small, locked storage room.
This eye-opening and heartbreaking film is based on the experiences of a friend of writer and director Darin Sallam’s mother, and shows events tragically familiar to Palestinians around the world.
Farha is under attack for accurately portraying the horror of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Toronto International Film Festival Review
FARHA_Trailer_English subtitle from Picture Tree International on Vimeo.
Jared Mobarak, The Film Stage, September 11, 2021
The text reads: Palestine, 1948. That’s all you need to know to understand what’s coming. A year earlier marked the start of the Palestinian Civil War between Jewish and Arab residents after the United Nations recommended the land’s separation in a Jewish and Arab state. Israel declared independence in May of 1948 and, as some history books describe it, a mass exodus arose to render about half the nation’s pre-WWII Arab population (700,000) into refugees without a home. To simply call it an exodus, however, is misleading. Most of these people didn’t choose to leave as a means of finding settlement elsewhere. They were driven out by Israeli military forces who in turn destroyed villages and murdered so-called “rebel forces” in an ethnic cleansing that continues today.
As anyone following the news knows, using the term genocide for what happened / is happening has always been a hotly disputed topic thanks to some people’s inability to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. And being that America is a huge Israeli ally, advocating for the lives and freedoms of a Palestinian people who had their land stolen from them—only to subsequently be treated like second-class citizens upon the land they were given (that was then also stolen despite agreements made)—is likely to get you labeled the latter. We’re accordingly taught to dismiss Palestinians as terrorists like many other Muslim groups. It’s thus important for Arab artists and historians to dare combat that stereotype by telling their stories too. Darin J. Sallam’s drama Farha is one.
In it she details the real-life tale of Radiyyeh, a 14-year-old girl whose village was destroyed during the Al-Nakba (Catastrophe). Names are changed and events dramatized, but it remains the same tale this young woman told upon reaching Syria that’s endured for generations. At its start is our introduction to the renamed Farha’s (Karam Taher) headstrong teenage rebellious streak in telling her Quran teacher that women should be worrying less about marriage and more about education. Her cousin / best friend Farida (Tala Gammoh) is lucky enough to live in the city to experience the latter while life in the village leaves Farha with many fewer options. Her father (Ashraf Barhom’s Abu Farha) is their mayor, however, and thus has means to send her too.
They’re living in tumultuous times, though. The British are leaving and the Arab villages have no means of defending themselves from the progressing Israeli forces coming to fill that void. On one hand Abu Farha wants his daughter to remain close as they await the Arab League’s promised assistance. On the other, he knows her potential and desire to learn could ultimately help them all in the long run. There just isn’t enough time to get affairs in order before the explosions start. Suddenly Farha is left with a choice of her own: flee with Farida’s family north or stay by her father’s side. Why she picks the latter comes with additional motivation, but it hardly matters once desperation leads her to being locked inside the pantry.
This is how we experience the horrors of what went on: through the cracks of a wooden door and gaps between stones. Abu Farha says he’ll return for her, but that’s hardly a guarantee. And while hiding in this room will keep her safe (and fed), the prospect of what she might have to face with only a dagger left behind for protection remains unknown. Sallam’s film turns from the hopeful sun-drenched days of a hillside community thinking towards the future to a claustrophobic thriller forcing Farha (and us) to helplessly watch the present depravity of war. Whether smoke from fires set to burn the village down or Israeli soldiers cornering fleeing Arabs with unprovoked malice, what she witnesses will invariably alter her entire outlook on humanity.
Sallam pulls no punches in her depictions of the callous nature of this endless battle in the Middle East. It’s no coincidence that she shows young boys chasing after the British with toy gun slingshots, propelling tiny stones at the soldiers before cutting to a scene between Abu Farha and his brother-in-law (Ali Suliman’s Abu Walid) where they discuss the audacity of those pretending like they possess an armed militia. It’s no different from today with Israelis firing into crowds of unarmed civilians because someone threw a can. Oppressors will utilize whatever excuses are at their disposal to continue their oppression; their zealots will believe the flimsiest of them if doing so serves their needs. Everything is a weapon for those itching to respond with deadly force.
I doubt the obvious allusions to Holocaust films (sans concentration camps) are unintentional, either. We’ve seen countless depictions of Jewish Europeans hiding from Nazis as the Third Reich stormed into homes with impunity to line people up against the wall and organize a firing squad. Farha becomes that innocent made to watch as people who look and talk like her are butchered feet away. That one would happen so soon after the other is therefore something to contemplate and discuss; one people’s suffering should never validate the conscious acts of causing another people to suffer in similar ways. As the broken Arabic of loudspeakers states that all Arabs must vacate or be killed in their homes, however, nothing about this diaspora’s commencement was ever voluntary.
Farha‘s success is thus predicated on our ability to watch what unfolds and believe its veracity. That will probably be a tall ask for those who deny Palestinians their right to be angry about what was done to them. Hopefully seeing it through the eyes of a child will help sway hearts and minds to reality, though. First-time actor Taher is fantastic in the eponymous role, struggling with allegiance to her village and dreams of enjoying the city. Just because one wishes to escape their simple life doesn’t mean they aren’t intrinsically bonded to it. We leave for our educations in the knowledge that home will remain, either as a time capsule or a siren calling us back. For too many Palestinians today, returning to theirs became impossible.
Farha premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Jared Mobarak is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic for The Film Stage, Art Director for the Buffalo, NY film series Cultivate Cinema Circle, and member of OFCS and GWNYFCA. You can follow his cinematic viewing habits at Letterboxd.
Activists say hundreds of spam accounts are giving low ratings and bad reviews for the film on rating platforms
Many of the accounts giving Farha low ratings on IMDb were newly created (TaleBox)
Nadda Osman, Middle East Eye, 2 December 2022
Hundreds of spam accounts have left negative reviews of the film Farha on the movie rating site IMDb, in what appears to be an organised campaign.
Streaming on Netflix and set during the Nakba of 1948, the film revolves around a teenage girl who watches Zionist militias kill her entire family, including a baby.
Jordanian director Darin Sallam says her debut feature is based on actual events, which she first heard about from her Palestinian father.
The film has been slammed by Israeli officials but Palestinians reject such criticisms, arguing that abuses like those depicted in the movie are documented to have happened.
Following the Israeli censure, the film’s ratings have dropped dramatically on IMDb, one of the internet’s most popular film review sites.
On 1 December, the film’s ratings went from 7.2 to 5.8 in a matter of hours, in what many activists and campaigners have called a targeted campaign.
According to activists, many of the negative reviews appeared to have come from the same source, containing similar comments, such as calling the film “one-sided” or a “big lie”.
One review, titled “propaganda and fantasy”, awarded the film one star and called it an “over emotional drama”.
Former Al Jazeera journalist and influencer Ahmed Shihab-Eldin says the negative reviews were part of an orchestrated effort to discredit the film and stop people from seeing it.
“The pacing of the posts reveals it was co-ordinated,” he told Middle East Eye.
“With each passing hour, dozens and dozens of vapid and vile reviews would appear, making wild accusations trashing the film. It was clear people had not seen the film, and only wanted to damage its reputation,” he added.
According to Shihab-Eldin, many of the accounts posting negative reviews of the film were newly created.
He says that around 1,000 negative reviews suddenly appeared on the website during a 24-hour period, which contained “inflammatory and hateful language”.
At the time of publication, the average review rating of Farha on the IMDb page sat at 8.1, suggesting the website had removed inauthentic ratings.
“Israel’s apartheid remains the root cause of Palestinians’ suffering,” said the group.
Palestinians inspect the ruins of a collapsed building destroyed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on August 6, 2022. (Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
JULIA CONLEY, Common Dreams, October 25, 2022
Calling for the International Criminal Court to open a new investigation into possible war crimes by Israeli military forces in Gaza in August, Amnesty International on Tuesday said the court must also include Israel’s illegal apartheid policies against the Occupied Palestinian Territories in its probe.
“As well as investigating war crimes committed in Gaza, the ICC should consider the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
The organization’s call centered on the three-day offensive launched by Israel between August 5-8 in the Gaza Strip, with advocates saying its research suggests three specific attacks could amount to war crimes.
Seventeen civilians were among the 49 Palestinian people who were killed by Israeli forces during the offensive, while seven were determined to have been killed by Palestinian rockets that were likely misfired. The group could not determine which side was responsible for the deaths of seven other civilians.
Amnesty noted that Israel, which claimed the attacks were “preemptive” and targeted the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, has set the stage for such deadly assaults on civilians for years by imposing a blockade and other apartheid policies on Gaza.
“These violations were perpetrated in the context of Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade on Gaza, which is a key tool of its apartheid regime,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, in a statement. “Palestinians in Gaza are dominated, oppressed, and segregated, trapped in a 15-year nightmare where recurrent unlawful attacks punctuate a worsening humanitarian crisis.”
“As well as investigating war crimes committed in Gaza, the ICC should consider the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Callamard added.
The group said Israel’s policies—including military control of Palestine, restrictions on the movement of millions of people in the West Bank, and denial of essential services—are the “root cause of Palestinians’ suffering.”
Israel’s apartheid remains the root cause of Palestinians’ suffering and the recurring violations against them and must be dismantled.https://t.co/h5UZTsnYmU
— Amnesty International (@amnesty) October 25, 2022
The call comes eight months after Amnesty outlined Israel’s apartheid system in a report, saying “the international community and the ICC should all investigate the commission of the crime of apartheid under international law.”
In its report released Tuesday regarding the three-day offensive that took place in August, the group said it had interviewed 42 people including attack survivors, family members of those killed, eyewitnesses, and medical professionals. A fieldworker, the organization’s evidence lab, and a weapons expert determined that at least three of the 17 attacks Amnesty documented should be investigated by the ICC as possible war crimes.
An Israeli tank fired a projectile on August 5, hitting the home of 22-year-old art student Duniana al-Amour and her family in the southern Gaza Strip. Al-Amour was killed and her mother was wounded. Amnesty concluded in its analysis that the family’s home had been “deliberately targeted,” even though there is “no evidence that any members of the al-Amour family could reasonably be believed to be involved in armed combat.”
Five children were killed on August 7 when a missile struck Al-Falluja cemetery, near the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. The children ranged in age from four to 16.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat directs the Palestine Writing Workshop on the West Bank. She’ll read poems & be in conversation with poet Deema Shehabi.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, and mother based in occupied East Jerusalem. Each day she passes through Israeli checkpoints, like the infamous Qalandia checkpoint, to direct the Palestine Writing Workshop, one of MECA’s partner organizations. Maya and her team at the Palestine Writing Workshop have published award-winning Arabic children’s books and led hundreds of interactive workshops from Nablus to Silwan to Gaza for children, youth, librarians and parents on reading aloud, creative writing, and storytelling. Her work is grounded in the belief that art and literature can change lives and aims to improve Palestinian children’s literacy and also encourage their imaginations. She is a gifted storyteller who captures the attention of children of all ages (and adults too!). Maya also runs writing courses for former prisoners, helping them transform trauma into art.
She has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, and she is an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub. Please join us to learn more about Maya’s work and life in Palestine!
Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Award’s NCBR Recognition Award. She co-authored Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and won the 2018 Nazim Hikmet poetry competition. Her work has also appeared in Literary Imagination, the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London, and Crab Orchard, and has been translated into French, Farsi, and Arabic; she has been nominated for the Pushcart prize several times.
Cosponsored by Middle East Children’s Alliance and Sacramento Bethlehem Sister City. Info: meca@mecaforpeace.org, 510-548-0542.
PRAISE FOR “You Can Be The Last Leaf”
“The Palestinian poet’s U.S. debut gathers two decades of her intimate testimony about private life in a public war zone, where ‘those who win by killing fewer children / are losers.’”—New York Times
“Al-Hayyat’s latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity . . . The vivid translations by Fady Joudah will jostle readers into discomfort and pin Al-Hayyat’s stunning voice into their ears.”—Booklist
“Abu Al-Hayyat explores the broader political and geographic aspects of Palestinian life under colonial rule while at the same time interweaving the quotidian aspects of life and loss in such settings. Within these frictions of exterior trauma and private contemplations, large constraints and small freedoms, these poems soar.”—Chicago Review of Books
Video recorded October 3, 2022
In 1948, the tiny Gaza Strip was cut off from the rest of historic Palestine, absorbing a huge number of Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral lands.
In 1967, it was militarily occupied by Israeli forces, its inhabitants suffering from a plethora of colonial domination techniques and movement restrictions over the subsequent decades.
An unprecedented land, air, and sea blockade was imposed on Gaza since June 2007, constituting the longest siege in modern history.
As the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 has noted in her latest report: “Israel’s apparent strategy is the indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population of two million Palestinians, whom it has confined to a narrow strip of land through its comprehensive 15-year-old air, land and sea blockade.”
The outcome has been a harrowing process of de-development resulting, as the UN Special Rapporteur notes, “in a 45 percent unemployment rate, a 60 percent poverty rate and with 80 percent of the population dependent on some form of international assistance, in significant part because of the hermetic sealing of Gaza’s access to the outside world”.
Besides this siege imposed by the Israeli state with Egyptian state collusion, the Palestinian people living in Gaza have been assaulted and bombarded by Israeli forces from land, sea, and air on a regular basis. Their cities, villages, and refugee camps have suffered from several Israeli military invasions, which have led to the killing of thousands and the maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Centering the voices of Palestinian scholars and intellectuals from Gaza, this panel examines the political and historic context of this process, accounting for its enormous human toll but also highlighting the ongoing will to resist this oppressive colonial present.
Hosted by Darwish Visiting Professor in Palestinian Studies, Abdel Razzaq Takriti
Panelists:
Jehad Abusalim, PhD candidate, History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies Joint Program, New York University
Aya Al-Ghazzawi , Writer, English language teacher, Palestinian Ministry of Education
Swee Chai Ang , Orthopedic surgeon, Author
Hadeel Assali, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Lecturer, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University
Fady Joudah, Physician, Poet, Translator
With generous support from Brown University’s Mahmoud Darwish Chair in Palestinian Studies.
Cosponsors: The Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston and The Jerusalem Fund.
The Madison-Rafah Sister City Project is partnering with the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to provide back-to-school backpacks to 2000 poor children in Gaza, including Rafah and Rafah camp which suffered significant damage and casualties in the latest Israeli assault.
Our goal is to provide at least 100 Gaza-produced backpacks that MECA will distribute at schools and kindergartens in Rafah. The backpacks cost $17.50 each for a total of $1,750. MRSCP will match half the cost of the first 100 backpacks before the end of August, when school resumes in Gaza. 100 percent of your donation will go to this project.
The people of Gaza suffered terribly from the recent Israeli bombardment, which was just the latest in a series of what Israeli officials callously refer to as “mowing the grass” — periodic military assaults on the two million people (one million of them children) with no safe place to hide in what has been called the world’s largest open-air prison.
But even when bombs are not falling, Gazans struggle to survive under the Israeli land, air and sea blockade that deprives them of safe drinking water, medical care, employment, and fuel, and which kills and traumatizes them day in and day out through this cruel policy of deliberate deprivation.
Your tax dollars are paying for this outrage. Please consider partially offsetting them by contributing to the backpack campaign.
Thank you for helping the children of Gaza.
AND…Here at Home:
A “Teeter-Totter Wall” conceived in 2009 to protest the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall has become reality in New Mexico.
MRSCP is passing along an unusual opportunity to help build a playground for migrant children in the Mexico-US border town of Sásabe. We have installed similar playgrounds in Rafah and Hebron in Palestine, and we know firsthand how much these simple facilities mean to the children who use them.
Infrastructure For the Youth, For the Future. No More Walls.
School of the Americas Watch, August 27, 2022
Sásabe is a small rural border town in Sonora, Mexico only a short distance from the border. Since the implementation of Title 42 in March 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has been dropping hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers at the doorsteps of the citizens of Sásabe every week. Even though the town had nothing in place to help support these vulnerable people, they helped as much as they could with very limited resources. The town reached out to Dora Rodriguez (Salvavision) and Gail Kocourek (Tucson Samaritans) and asked for their help. Dora was already involved with providing aid to Nogales, Sonora.
In response to the request, in 2021 Dora and Gail opened a Resource Center (Casa de la Esperanza) in Sásabe. Only walking distance from the port of entry, it is a space for migrants who need aid and refuge. “Our mission is to restore some of their dignity with a hot meal and a little hope” says Dora.
Dora and the Mayor of Sásabe asked Mike Tork, a Veterans For Peace (VFP) national board member, who also works with the School of Americas Watch (SOAW), if it would be possible to build a playground for the children, those living in Sásabe and those dropped off by CBP.
Mike has assembled a team to build the playground. “This is about reclaiming space and filling it with kindness and compassion. It’s a way to resist hatred, racism and to be in solidarity with vulnerable people and communities” he said.
We will follow the guidance of Dora, Gail and the community. Construction is planned to begin in the fall (Sept/Oct) once the weather is cooler.
Please donate generously. Funds will go towards the playground and to help support Casa de la Esperanza.
Please read this letter to North Carolina’s US Congressional Representatives from VJP leadership urging them to co-sign.
May 23, 2022
Dear Representative,
We are Voices for Justice in Palestine, a North Carolina-based nonprofit working for a just and lasting peace in Israel-Palestine. We are a nonpartisan 501c3 working with interfaith and diverse social justice partners. Our membership consists of citizen-activists, scholars, scientists, pastors, theologians, and professionals who have studied this issue extensively and traveled widely in the region. We focus on education, legislative advocacy, and media presence in order to raise awareness of issues and perspectives largely absent from the public conversation in American society.
We are writing to you to ask you to co-sponsor Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan)’s historic resolution recognizing “The Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic), commemorating the 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who were driven from their homes and their land in 1947-1949.
The resolution calls for:
We strongly support this resolution because it has significant educational value. Our research indicates that a great many North Carolinians are poorly informed about Palestinian history. They know little or nothing about the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in the Nakba. Those who have heard of it have been misled by myths and disinformation that obscure the truth. We view Rep. Tlaib’s resolution as an important public service that will lead to better understanding of this tragedy. The more knowledgeable our citizens are about this history, the more likely we are to progress toward a just and lasting peace in Israel-Palestine.
It would also establish a stronger basis for Congress to support humanitarian assistance programs for Palestinian refugees, which are desperately needed.
We are sending this letter to all of your colleagues in the North Carolina congressional delegation, both Republicans and Democrats. This is not a partisan issue. A just and lasting peace in this conflicted land that three major religions call holy transcends politics and demands our most compassionate and well-informed response.
Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully yours,
The Governing Board of Voices for Justice in Palestine
