Cinema
Return to Haifa
عائد إلى حيفا
Kassem Hawal · 1982
Synopsis
In April 1948, driven out of Haifa by the fighting, Said and Safia have to leave their five-month-old son Khaldoun behind in the city. Twenty years later, after the 1967 war, the border opens and the couple can return to the house they left. There they find Miriam, a Jewish woman from Poland, who has raised the child under another name: Said and Safia must ask themselves to whom this son and this house belong.
Context
The film was produced for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and shot in the summer of 1981 in Lebanon, in difficult conditions, with camp residents among the extras; the East German actress Christine Schorn plays Miriam in it. It was first shown in Damascus in 1982. From 1968 to 1982, Palestinian organisations produced more than sixty films, almost all of them documentaries, whose archives disappeared when the Palestinians left Beirut in 1982.
Who it is for
A film in Arabic with subtitles, rare, shown mostly at festivals; Kanafani's novella can be read in French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the major films of Palestinian cinema of exile; the novella was also adapted in Iran in 1995.
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