Pre-film Poetry Reading

Hala Alyan

Palestinian American poet

HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel "Salt Houses", winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel "The Arsonists’ City", and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently "The Moon That Turns You Back". Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.

Fertile Memory

Michel Khleifi

99 min

Prismatic Ground kicks off its fourth edition with the CINEMATEK (Belgian Film Archive) restoration of Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), a visceral glimpse of everyday life in the occupied West Bank. A reading by poet Hala Alyan will commence the evening, and researcher, writer, and curator Adam HajYahia will appear to contextualize the film. An afterparty co-hosted by DJs Against Apartheid will follow at h0l0.

Fertile Memory (Michel Khleifi, 1981, 99 min.)
Restored DCP. In Arabic with English Subtitles.

The first feature length film to be shot in the West Bank, Fertile Memory is a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the dispossession that heavily determines their lives. Romia Farah—the director’s aunt—is a widowed grandmother working in an Israeli garment factory. Her tenacious personality fuels a decades-long legal battle to reclaim her expropriated land, as well as her strict adherence to patriarchal values. Sahar Khalifa is a feminist writer teaching at Birzeit University. She struggles with the double oppression of Israeli occupation and the gendered ostracization and loneliness she experiences after seeking divorce. Fertile Memory marks a distinct shift in Palestinian filmmaking, from a unified revolutionary cinema, to a capacious reflection of Palestinian society and its many individuals, contradictions, and temporalities. — Tiffany Malakooti, Bidoun

“It is Khleifi’s achievement to have embodied certain aspects of Palestinian women’s lives in film. He is careful to let the strengths of Farah and Sahar emerge slowly, even if at a pace that risks losing the film the larger audience it deserves. He deliberately disappoints the expectations engendered in us by the commercial film (plot, suspense, drama), in favor of a representational idiom more innovative and – because of its congruence with its anomalous and eccentric material – more authentic.” — Edward Said