Little Palestine is a window on a near past, that of Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East, caught up by the regime.e Bashar Al Assad between 2013 and 2018 and today reduced to the diaspora. Widely ignored by Western media compared to the current coverage of the headquarters of the Azovstal steelworks – though otherwise shorter – this sad episode was documented from inside by Palestinian Abdallah Al-Khatib. This powerful testimony takes the traits of a diary or manual of the besieged who relates the states of souls, hopes and daily sorrows of a people suffering the martyrdom collectively. 181 people will die of hunger in general indifference.
« In a state of siege, the real prison is time. Beware. If you follow the time, he'll kill you. Let him go.
Fill the void of meaning as long as you can.»
LIttle Palestine is born of a field approach. Abdullah Al-Khatib, today exiled to Berlin, explained to World this winter how much « The act of filming, even before it became a way of documenting this story, was for him an act of survival, a way of preserving [singing] psychological balance ». Like Anne Frank's newspaper, writing and his contemporary avatar, filming, serves as a loophole. While time is suspended by the horror of the siege, the inhabitants wander. Walking becomes an act of survival. The director thus filmes the passing streets where both walk as much as they can, some at a slow pace: that of a dead-living, heavy approach. Exhausted by the lack of food, an old woman would rather die struck by a shell than wait for death in indignity. The inhabitants are looking for herbs between the cobblestones as a meal. Time becomes obsessed and locks prisoners in the cruelly lacking hatred, vengeance or thirst for justice.
« In a state of siege, walking is a survival ritual. The ultimate exercise of freedom. A parade of confinement in the darkness of your home. In a state of siege, people walk endlessly in areas with atomized borders »
Yarmouk besieged daily « who are picking smiles on which Death did not fall the day before » as the narrator says. Life snipers like so many escape attempts. « I'm from a country where windows overlook the lack of food » Can one read on a graffiti of a ruined wall. The dust is ubiquitous, the grey tones while in the distance there are machine gun fire. There is a helicopter on the horizon that drops an explosive barrel on popular neighbourhoods. « What was that? They'd miss us more! » looses an old woman with a laconic look, she who has already known the 1948 Arab Israeli War. The hungry are waiting for hours for a simple boiling water mixed with summary spices. Some sell cactus on an improvised market. « It's not so bad. » Try to convince a passerby. Children play and dream of shawarma or roast chicken when one of them answers that he only dreams of his brother returning to life. A shift that touches the heart when essential comes to miss.
A girl, Tasnim, is interviewed by Abdallah Al-Khatib. It is squatted in grass, in search of mooring, whose flower is poisonous. This is probably one of the most edifying testimonies of the film. The little girl wears the mask of those who now live with Death. She is worthy, resigned to her fate, since we must find something to eat for her mother who can no longer produce milk for her infant. « Before you dreamed of what Tasnim ? » Asks him for the cameraman. « I've never dreamed of anything. » retorts the child by blowing and continuing his task. « Food is all » She finally confesses. A few moments later, a shell fell on a building a few tens of meters from the gathering. The mask falls a fraction of a second, then the child resumes its activities, as if the war had become daily and burdensome of a life dedicated exclusively to survival.
More than a testimony from the siege of Yarmouk, Little Palestine philosopher on the fate of the besieged, like the narrator of The Red Lineless fiction. The camera fades to better let the portraits of the prisoners draw. Time lost, the quest for dignity, but also the relationship to the other govern the days. Sometimes spontaneous demonstrations erupt. Protestataires form a short moment a single body and head directed towards freedom. They try to reverse the routine, hope becomes vague before falling down against the bulwark of reality: repression. The final result is Allah's fate. In this No mans land Without public freedoms as well as essential goods, there is only men in truth, when everything is lacking.
Beyond the dehydrated and malnourished, whose number swells day by day, solidarity grows. Abdallah Al-Khatib's mother improvised herself as a nurse. In the middle of a street, a pianist gives the tempo to a choir of singers, while shots remind that the war does not suffer any truce here. As touching as essential to historical testimony, Little Palestine is a fragment of the past, while the Yarmouk camp and its tenants are now exiled, following the Islamic state's invasion in 2015. Azovstal today echoes Yarmouk who was already a reminiscence of the seats of Tel al-Zaatar in 1976, by the Maronite factions of Lebanon, or the Camp Chatilabetween 1985 and 1987, by the Shiite militia Amal. The siege is a war tactic that has been going through ages since the Middle Ages, today in Ukraine or Yemen, yesterday in Syria. This documentary is to be seen and not to be missed on DVD with in addition four Yarmouk stories from a collaborative workshop.
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