To register to attend this event via Zoom please click here..
The screening of the film will be followed by Q&A discussion with film director Nahed Awwad. Running time is 52 Minutes, 2007. English subtitles. The program begins at 12:00 PM US EDT; 18:00 Europe; 19:00 Palestine Time
About the Film
The Jerusalem Airport lies along the road that links Jerusalem to Ramallah. It has been occupied by Israeli army since 1967, at a 5 kilometer distance from Ramallah and 10 kilometer distance from Jerusalem. Today, to the east of the runway, a huge military checkpoint blocks the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, a dead end street.
Nahed Awwad discovers that life has not always been like this, and that this sad spot used to be a place where international aircrafts landed in the 1950s and 1960s, when Palestinians traveled freely. The happy images and testimonies of the past contrast bitterly with those of the present where access is denied to the aviation zone that is now being besieged behind barbed wire and soon will be trapped behind the Israeli Separation Wall.
Nahed Awwad goes to meet this place, evoking the past in order to have a better apprehension of the present: today’s Palestinian reality that is marked by forgetfulness.
Nahed Awwad
About Film Director
Nahed Awwad is a Palestinian independent filmmaker and a film curator based in Berlin. She has been working in Film and Television since 1997. Awwad was professionally trained in Canada, Qatar, and Belgium. In 2004 she got her film diploma from the European film college in Denmark and has since released eight films, among them “25 km”, “Going for Ride?”, “5 Minutes from Home”, and “Gaza Calling”, Palestine:Banned in Berlin; all were meticulously researched. The ethos of Awwad’s filmmaking is to provide intimate access to the characters featured in her films. Audiences feel they know – and understand – the protagonists.
Artistic Statemen
I grew up in a country that has been controlled by foreign military and where one's identity and existence is questioned on a daily basis. The circumstances are subject to unforeseeable, dramatic changes from one day to the other. Your normal way to school or work is cut off by pop-up checkpoints or by the construction of an eight meter high wall. For over 20 years now, I have been instinctively driven to collect and preserve the memory of the people and the landscape of my homeland. This urge to protect memory is the reason for me making films.
Today, memory and archive became the leitmotif of my work. For example, in my film “5 Minutes from Home” about the Jerusalem Airport, I was not only able to revive the memory of a forgotten place, but also assemble material from private collections to build an archive that did not exist in the public domain.