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The screening of the film will be followed by Q&A discussion with the audience. Running time is 63 Minutes. English subtitles. The program begins at 12:00 PM US EDT; 18:00 Europe; 19:00 Palestine Time
About the Film
When Mustafa went for a visit to Gaza in 2006, he was 18 years old. He was never allowed to return – his mother Hekmat has been fighting to see him again for seven years now.
Two families torn apart. They share the same “crime”: being registered with a Gaza address in their Identity Cards. Under Israeli rule, they are considered “infiltrators” in their own country. Their lives have turned into a permanent struggle. Parents can only talk to their sons on the phone; sisters can only see their brothers on the internet – mothers and their children fighting to be together at last.
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.