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Khadijeh Habashneh and Women’s Films in the Long 70s of the Revolution
Abstract
Khadijeh Habashneh was deeply involved with the Palestinian revolutionary cinema from 1974-82 and has, since the 1980s’s been active on executive boards of organizations advocating for women’s presence and involvement in political and social life in Palestine and Jordan. She was also one of the few women filmmakers in the PCI, and her 1977 film, Atfal…Walakan (Children Without Childhood) about the organization Beit Atfal Al Sumoud created in Beirut to care for the children survivors of the Tel El-Zaatar massacre of 1976, is the only film of the two she made that remains. Khadijeh is well-known as the archivist of the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI) and is currently working on restoring prints of the films that she has been able to locate from the dispersed body of the archive following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. She recently written her account of the people involved in the Palestinian revolutionary cinema, mostly associated with Fateh, in her book Fursan al Cinema (Knights of Cinema) (2019), the English translation of which will be published in 2022. There were some intersections if not direct collaborations between the PCI and other women filmmakers in Lebanon such as Nabeeha Lutfi, Joycelyne Saab, Mai Masri, and Randa Chahal Sabbagh, as evidenced in her book. This suggests the foundational role the Palestinian revolution played in furthering not only women’s participation in the struggle but also women’s work as intellectuals and filmmakers authoring and documenting new ways of perceiving the complicated political and social contexts of Lebanon during the civil war.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Mashreq
Sub Area
World History