with an introduction by Neha Thantry

screened at the People's Free University, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh Campus

The first feature-length film to be shot on the Palestinian “Green Line” in the West Bank, Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1980) paints a lyrical portrait of two Palestinian women – one is an elderly widow, dispossessed of the land left to her by her deceased husband, who remained in Nazareth after 1948. The other, a successful writer and teacher from Nablus, alienated by her status as a divorcée. The women never meet, and yet they almost seem to be in constant conversation with each other, their “stuckness” in their respective interior lives framed against idyllic Palestinian land. Transcending the boundaries between fiction and documentary, the film is a pensive rumination on what it means to navigate a patriarchal society under occupation, and a loving ode to the steadfast resistance that is borne from negotiating the contradictions of everyday life.

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