THERE WAS NOTHING HERE BEFORE
dir. Yvann Yagchi, Switzerland, 2024, 71 min
The son of Palestinian immigrants travels from Switzerland to the West Bank to confront a childhood friend, who is now living in one of the fortified Israeli settlements. The meeting after so many years doesn't go exactly as Yvann Yagchi planned. On the one hand, it forces him to revise his film plans, and on the other, to reflect on his own family's past. One of the director's great-grandfathers, a journalist and activist, belonged to the local intellectual elite and co-founded the Palestinian national movement. Today, an Israeli couple runs a charming guesthouse in his former home. The film, being a meditation on the roots of one's own identity, becomes an attempt to polemicize with the arguments that 1940s Palestine was essentially a "land without a people," a desert waiting to be settled and civilized.
Rotterdam IFF, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, DOK Leipzig, WATCH DOCS FF, San Franscisco Jewish FF
06-11-2025 16:15, KINO LUNA
Language: french Subtitles: Polish, English
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