Mahmoud Darwish

Accompanying from a place to another the poet who spent years in exile far from his native land of al-Birwa, in Haifa, Cyprus, Tunis, Amman, Paris, Cairo and Ramallah.

A three-chapter (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise) meditation on the city of Sarajevo in the wake of the Bosnian war, on Palestine and Israel, and on war itself.

Cinepoem about the current Palestinian tragedy, with Brazilian films from 1922 and 1932 (the indigenous catastrophe), documentaries from 2023/2024, essays by Jean-Luc Godard, Hani Jawharieh and Mustafa Abu Ali, statements by Edgar Morin and Noam Chomsky, and a poem by Mahmud Darwich.

A fascinating glimpse of Godard at work during the filming of the celebrated interview sequence in Notre musique featuring the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. He won numerous awards for his works. Darwish used Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied its capital, Beirut. The film is a rare example of a PLO film made after the PLO’s departure from Beirut. It documents the burned and destroyed cultural and educational centers from which Israelis stole films, photographs, and historical and contemporary manuscripts. It includes interviews with key members of the Palestinian cultural scene such as Mahmoud Darwish and Ismail Shammout and those in charge of cultural and educational centers that were destroyed.

"Write Down, I am an Arab" tells the story of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet and one of the most influential writers of the Arab world. His writing shaped Palestinian identity and helped galvanize generations of Palestinians to their cause. Born in the Galilee, Darwish's family fled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and returned a few years later to a ruined homeland. These early experiences would provide the foundation for a writing career that would come to define an entire nation.

Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.

Henri Laborit's thoughts taken from Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard shooting Notre musique, a song by Fairuz: just some of the materials in this essay-tribute to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich.