Screening will start at 12:00 Noon US EST; 18:00 Europe; 19:00 Palestine; 17:00 UK; running time, 18 minutes; English language. The screening will be followed with a discussion with the film director/audience.

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Synopsis
For over thirty years in the early part of the 20th century, Erik and Edith Matson took photographs of Palestine which showed the varied and lively society of the country, which was 90% Arab at the time. They also depicted the growing threat to Palestinian nationhood from the Zionist political movement, aided and abetted by the British government, which trampled on the rights of the Palestinian Arabs in order to populate the country with hundreds of thousands of European Jews. The photographs create a poignant narrative of what might have been, if the Palestinians had been granted independence after World War I, like other Arab countries liberated from Turkish control.

Film Description
The US Library of Congress holds 20,000 photographs of Palestine, taken by the Matson Photographic Company in the first half of the 20th century.  Karl Sabbagh has created a moving and expressive film based on a selection of these photographs, to counterpoint the story of how Palestine was taken from its Palestinian Arab population and handed over to a people who had no legitimate right to displace them.

Karl Sabbagh

About the Director
Karl Sabbagh is a British Palestinian, a former BBC producer, and a writer of a dozen non-fiction books, including Palestine: A Personal History, Britain in Palestine, A Modest Proposal, about the One-State Solution, The Antisemitism Wars, and The Path to October 7th, published in December 2024.