End of the Year Issue
By Ghazal Khalife
December
Rarely is there a movie about Palestine that does not receive political backlash. The Israeli state has been trying to dominate the country’s narrative since the Nakba, especially in the Western world. The Israeli perspective on the Palestinian conflict has often been singled out as the true one. While many question the state’s ongoing aggression (nowhere near as loudly), they rarely question its legitimacy and origins. This is where the movie Farha comes in, using the perspective of a 14-year-old girl to describe the horrors of the Nakba and the atrocities committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Farha is a movie based on actual events set in a small Palestinian village before the Nakba. Nakba in Arabic translates to “catastrophe,” and no film has been able to exude such a strong connotation of the word disaster. The movie shocks us through its raw illustration of the trauma faced by Palestinians as their villages were destroyed, their families killed, and their lives upturned completely. The film is written and directed by Darin J. Sallam, a Jordanian award-winning director and writer who chose to spotlight Palestinian suffering through the perspective of a young girl seeing her dreams crushed and witnessing the destruction of her people.
In this film, we witness the upheaval created by the battles for Israel’s creation; the director transports us from an ambiance of hope with a looming danger to that of absolute tragedy, and since we know how history plays out, we already dismiss the prospect of a happy ending. Sallam enriches the film with the symbolism of a fig tree, gold earrings, and, most importantly, a school registration paper. It makes us ache for what could have been: what Farha’s future could have been and, on a grander scale, what Palestine could have been. It overcomes any filters and showcases the sheer violence, and utter dehumanization of the other as the IDF soldiers raid villages, burning all that stands in their way. Hence, it was predictable that when a film like this was streamed on Netflix, it was received with strong condemnation from the Israeli state. For Israel, this film threatens its legitimacy and version of history and dismantles the power of having a single story. As a result, the film has been subject to immense criticism, manifested as calls to ban it and boycott its streaming network.
“The dangers of A single story”
To explain why Farha has been met with such hostility and why some have called on Netflix users to cancel their subscriptions, I will use a quote by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity… When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
To establish one’s story in stone, it is sometimes necessary to neglect or silence alternative ones. Farha being streamed on a global platform risks deconstructing the story propped up by the Israeli state for so long. For the first time, a marginalized narrative reaches: the trauma of a people often misunderstood and misrepresented. The film’s subject matter can be compared to other stories of oppression — many have compared Farha to Anne Frank, with both little girls witnessing extreme and life-altering aggression. A popular Israeli influencer rushed to denounce the movie, calling it “blatantly anti-semitic” and a distortion of history. These claims have no ground in reality, but all they do is serve the Israeli narrative, preventing people, most importantly Israelis themselves, from breaking the barriers of the single story and approaching the other side. Boycotting the movie is boycotting the other, limiting them to a box of prejudice and stereotyping.
One might disagree with the film’s brutalist portrayal of IDF soldiers, but it remains crucial to allow it a chance to remain willing to hear another perspective, one of pain. It is impossible to deny that the 1948 Nakba was a time when massive breaches of human rights were committed, where people refused to listen to one another, where one nation was annihilated for the other to survive.