Intercultural cinema: “Little Palestine Diary of a Siege”
Platform Upgrade invites you to the film screening of the award-winning documentary film Little Palestine Diary of a Siege directed by Abdallah Al-Khatibana.
The Yarmouk district (Damascus, Syria) was home to the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world between 1957 and 2018. When the Syrian Revolution broke out, the Bashar Al-Assad regime saw Yarmouk as a refuge for rebels and a potential hotbed of resistance and launched its siege in 2013. With food, medicine and electricity gradually cut off, Yarmouk has been cut off from the rest of the world. Filmmaker Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in Yarmouk and lived there until he was expelled by Daesh soldiers in 2015. Between 2011 and 2015, he and his friends documented the daily lives of the besieged camp’s residents who decided to face the bombing, displacement and hunger and counter them with gatherings for protests, learning, music, love and joy. The war and siege have irrevocably changed thousands of lives – from Abdallah’s mother, who became a nurse and took over the care of the camp’s elderly, to the most agile activists whose dedication to the fight for a free Palestine gradually led to hunger.
The film will be shown in the MO Staro Trnje (Trnjanska cesta 128) on Thursday, April 10th at 19:00.
The film will be screened with English subtitles.
Entry is free, requiring only a free online ticket from Entrio.
Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in 1989 in Yarmouk. He studied sociology at the University of Damascus. Before the revolution, he worked for the UN as coordinator of activities and volunteers. He created the humanitarian aid association Wataad, with several friends, who carried out dozens of projects in several regions of Syria, and in particular in Yarmouk. He participated in several documentary films documenting the life of the Yarmouk camp, notably being one of the cameramen of 194. Us Children of the Camp which premiered at Visions du Réel in 2017. The German magazine GreenPeace identified him as one of the 2014 “peacemakers”. In Sweden, he received the Per Anger Human Rights Award in 2016. Abdallah currently lives in Germany, where he was recently granted refugee status.
Platform Upgrade is a non-formal network of civil society organisations from different sectors (human rights, sustainable living, environmental protection, culture, art and youth), coordinated by Operation City. The goal of Upgrade is the development and opening of the Intercultural social centre, a cultural centre that will answer to the needs of local communities, civil society and current social and cultural challenges of Zagreb by using innovative and creative practices.
The event supported by the City of Zagreb through the Culture and Art in the Community program and the Kultura nova Foundation.
