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 You are here: Home > Resources > Resources on Film
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| Title: | | Director: | Eyal Sivan | | Year: | 1987 | | Language: | Arabic with English subtitles | | Duration: | 81 minutes | |
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Aqabat-Jaber is one of the sixty Palestinian refugee camps built in the Middle East by the UN at the beginning of the 1950s. It is the biggest camp in the Middle East situated some 3 kilometres south of Jericho. The majority of its 65,000 inhabitants came from those villages in central Palestine that were destroyed in 1948. The 1967 war pushed 95% of that population across the banks of the river Jordan. The traces of war and the effects of erosion by the desert accentuate the contrasts between the abandoned refugees and the huts that they still occupy, and make Aqabat-Jaber look like a ghost town. Filmed in 1987, a few months before the Intifada, this film tells the story of a disinherited generation brought up in the nostalgia of places they never knew and which no longer exist. The story of a temporary solution that became a permanent way of life. This film is about a ghost town, fulfilled by nostalgia and memories.
1st Prize of the Jury at the �Cin�ma du R�el�, Paris 1987
Golden Crown at the Festikon, Amsterdam 1988 Air France
Radio France Prize at the Belfort Film Festival, 1988
Jury�s Prize in the social-political Section International Film Festival, Oakland 1988
Jury�s Special Mention at the Internationale Filmwoche, Mannheim 1988
Press extracts
"Some refugees welcome the chance to introduce themselves, air their grievances and bemoan their fates ; other scorn the filmmakers. Sivan, ever sympathetic to their conditions, extracts detailed life stories from the displaced persons as he pans the daily life at the camps." Variety
"Aqabat Jaber" offers a poetic vision of homelessness a permanent state of mind. Poignancy merges with absurdity, turning the makeshift life into a kind of grotesque purgatory, a sad dreamland." The Boston Phoenix
"Aqabat Jaber" is a definite highlight. It�s a sad and troubling look at a decrepit West Bank refugee camp where Palestinians, many displaced landowners living in exile, talk about their lives and their hopes of regaining their land. For many of these refugees, some there since 1948, the land is a symbol of lost culture and lost self-respect." Boston Herald
"The reason "Aqabat Jaber" stands out from other films of its kind is that Eyal Sivan makes no attempt to come up with a miracle solution. (...) The implicit question is whether such things are to be tolerated." AfricAsia
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Aqabat-Jaber, passing through | |
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