A Stone’s Throw [على مرمى حجر]

Amine was a little boy when the Nakba expelled him from Haifa along with his family. As a refugee in Beirut, he was forced to relocate once again for work to Zirku Island in the Persian Gulf. Belonging to the United Arab Emirates, access to the island was restricted to employees of the oil company that owned a refinery there, a place previously home to birds and plant life. Amine narrates fragments of the years he lived among men and fossil fuel (no children or women are allowed on the island), he recalls his work and the ways it ties him to his ancestors. Both Haifa and Zirku Island are inaccessible to Razan Al Salah, a woman and Palestinian, who has to find ways to reconstruct the image of these places through third-party images that range from dozens of comments on Google Maps, through bird conservation videos to workplace safety instructions. In the search for material to imagine the spaces where Amine lived appears a photograph that forms a triangle between his three homes: the Haifa gas pipeline, built by British Petrol during the British colonisation in Palestine, maintained until 1948. As we hear about the desolate oil work on that isolated and far-away island of Amine, the roots of a family tree reveal themselves on that gas pipeline: his ancestors, like so many other fighters for the liberation of Palestine, blew up the gas pipeline several times. So many times, in fact, that it stopped being used after the start of the Zionist colonisation and it had to continue via Tripoli. The film combines images that skirt around Haifa without entering the city proper with a journey alongside Amine through the streets of Beirut, a city that provided him a second home and that seemed so often to share a destination with his birthplace of Haifa, the colonial siege of the State of Israel. What we hear is also a montage of different presences: comments about Zirku Island compiled on the Internet —some seem written by machines or alienated men—, poems, comments from Amine, pieces of Palestinian history. It all mixes together to construct a text that is reconfigured on the screen, mixed in a kind of glitch that travels the history of not only a people and a region but of those the world over who always saw the Palestine fight as a lighthouse.

Lucía Salas