Programme 5
In Partition, Diana Allan recovers silent footage from the archives of the British Mandate for Palestine —1917-1948— and overlays it with audio recordings of present-day refugees in Lebanon. The images in the British archive were produced for an administrative and military purpose— to document the colonial management of the territory.
The title refers, on the one hand, to the 1947 UN Partition Plan that divided the British Mandate into two zones and gave rise to the Nakba —translated as the “catastrophe”, or the first forced displacement of Palestinians—. On the other hand, it describes the film itself, which radically separates the image from the sound. Far from trying to “lend a voice” to the image to reconstruct a realistic scene, Allan provokes a deliberate shock.
In this sense, the fly can also be an interference, the buzzing of oral memory perching on the film image, preventing us from calmly contemplating official history and reminding us that the images of imperial control were always incomplete.
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In Jumana Manna's Foragers, flies are not just the insects of the countryside, but also the drones and patrols that constantly buzz above the foragers. The film portrays the traditional harvesting of wild plants such as akkoub and za'atar in Palestine: an ancient custom now turned crime by Israeli environmental protection laws.
Manna's work blends fiction and documentary to show how the search for food becomes a game of cat and mouse, where bureaucracy tries to stifle the subsistence of Palestinian communities by legislating even the country’s weeds. It is precisely these wild plants, which grow uncontrollably and indifferent to Israeli laws, that end up revealing the violence exerted by the structures of the State on those people who seek a way of life on the margins of agriculture.
Xavier Nueno
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