Origin: Palestine | Fiction | Director: Dima Hourani | 11 minutes

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Past Tense Continuous

by Dima Hourani, docudrama 11 min, Palestine 2014 (2011?)

And if the Palestinian refugees had returned to their towns and villages, their homes and their lands? And if they had returned to Haifa, Jaffa, Al-Masmiyya and Acre, the artist wonders, while families in black and white cross the city in a forced march, uninterrupted for 70 years. This reconstruction plays on images printed in the Palestinian collective memory, and creates a space to intervene in the narrative, whereas the facts in question do not only belong to the past, but continue to occur until now.

Past Tense Continuous shifts the line of inquiry in a historical direction by asking how collective memory is mediated through multiple technologies of memory. Focusing on the case of Palestinian exile, I examine “the past” as it is imagined in a political landscape saturated with iconic images raised to the level of myth.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/141096468

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View trailer