Origin: Unknown | Fiction | Director: Larissa Sansour | 10 minutes

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Soup over Bethlehem (Mloukhieh)

Larissa Sansour 2006 Fiction 10 min.

Larissa Sansour's video art short depicts an ordinary Palestinian family,
the artist's own, around a dinner table on a rooftop overlooking Bethlehem.
What starts as a culinary discussion about the national dish being served
(mloukhieh) evolves into a conversation on politics, emphasizing a
symbiosis of food and politics Sansour suggests as indicative of the
Palestinian experience. But rather than positing a caricatured national
type, Soup Over Bethlehem shows national identity stereotypes thoroughly
disrupted the Arabic spoken at the table is interrupted by English, while
family members hold an international variety of passports, jobs, and
degrees. These diasporic traits, present in all Palestinian family
histories, lend a globalized quality to life and identity, even under the
confines of occupation. Under such conditions, perhaps it is the mloukhieh
in the serving bowl that most stably conveys a sense of national heritage a
single constant amidst a sea of fluctuation. And so, the meal itself comes
to figure as a gastronomic anchoring of a Palestinian identity in eternal
flux.

Full feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYx-FF6xBA

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View trailer