DOCUMENTARY | 1987 & 1995 | 81 & 61 MN | COLOR | 4:3 | OVST | o.v ARABIC | ST ENGLISH
 
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 was is the biggest camp in the Middle East situated some 3 kilometers south of Jericho.
 
Aqabat Jaber films by Eyal Sivan tell the story of all refugees, deported population, displaced persons, that are at the center of the great conflicts of the 20th Century. It points to a critical question of peace processes in Israel-Palestine. Can peace between Israel and Palestine be possible without the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland which has now become Israel?

AQABAT-JABER Passing through & Peace With No Return? by Eyal Sivan

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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 was is the biggest camp in the Middle East situated some 3 kilometers 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.

Aqabat Jaber films by Eyal Sivan tell the story of all refugees, deported population, displaced persons, that are at the center of the great conflicts of the 20th Century. It points to a critical question of peace processes in Israel-Palestine. Can peace between Israel and Palestine be possible without the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland which has now become Israel?

Key words: Palestinian refugees, Palestine, Occupation, Right of return, Nakba, 1948, Refugee camps, Israel-Palestine conflict, Peace process

Education interests: Colonialism, Film and Media, Geography, History, International Law, Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, Palestine Studies, Political Science, Visual Anthropology
Eyal Sivan, is a documentary filmmaker and theoretician based in Paris
Born in 1964 in Haifa Israel and grow up in Jerusalem.

After exercising as a professional photographer in Tel-Aviv, he leaves Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Since he is sharing is time between Europe and Israel.

Known for his controversial films, Sivan directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. His cinematographic body of work was shown and awarded various prizes in prestigious festivals. Beside worldwide theatrical releases and TV broadcasts, Sivan's films are regularly exhibit in major art shows around the world.

He publishes and lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary filmmaking and ethics, political crimes and representation, political use of memory, genocide and representation, etc.

He is the founder and artistic director of the Paris based documentary films production company momento! and the film distribution agency Scalpel. He is the founder and Chief Editor of South Cinema Notebooks - a journal of cinema and political critic edited by the Sapir academic college in Israel where he lectures regularly.

In the last years Sivan was Reader (associate professor) in media production at the school of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI), at the University of East London (UEL) were he was co-leading the MA program in Film, video and new media. He his teaching at the Master in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. He is member of the editorial board of the Paris based publishing house La Fabrique.

"Eyal Sivan continues his relentless and disturbing work, from film to film, investigating thre true nature of his native country. Any study of memory, of history, of values, of the myths of Israel confronted with reality, depends, of course, and perhaps above all, for Eyal Sivan on getting to know your opponent. In this case, the enemy / partner over the last 50 years, the palestinian people."
- Le Nouvel Observateur
This film goes beyond politics. It is about country people confined for the last 38 years in refugee camps, about the humiliation of being severed from their land, from their orchards, their villages. Nothing happens in the film because nothing happens in their lives. Endlessly waiting, some still cling to the hope of returning one day to their land. It is not a silent film, it cries out in its simplicity, wrenching the heart. These are human beings ?? So, what...?! HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

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

Aqabat-Jaber by Eyal Sivan, winner of cinéma du réel 1987, is a very powerful testimony on uprooted people of all origins. LIBÉRATION

There is, in Eyal Sivan's film, the acute awareness of the camera's gaze in everyone that is filmed. CAHIERS DU CINÉMA

A movie beyond the politics, since here scorned people are dignified and proud. POSITIF

" For its poetic, multi-layered, and exquisite execution both linguistically, and aesthetically a film which at once gives insight into a highly personal experience as well as a universal disposition of loss, injustice and distance..."
Emily Jacir, Serge AbiAad, Rebecca Cremona (Jury statement) -

AQABAT-JABER Passing through & Peace With No Return? by Eyal Sivan

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