Film Screening: Fertile Memory (1980)

Michel Khleifi’s feature debut, FERTILE MEMORY, is a landmark in Palestinian cinema. It was the first full-length film shot in the occupied West Bank by a Palestinian director and the first Palestinian film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Neither a documentary nor a work of fiction, the film blends elements of both to craft a portrait of two very different women: Farah Hatoum, a fifty-year-old widow living with her children and grandchildren in Nazareth, and Sahar Khalifeh, a divorced novelist and young mother living in the West Bank. Despite their differing circumstances and histories, Farah and Sahar represent two sides of the same story: that of Palestinian women caught between the memory of their lost homeland and the reality of the encroaching Zionist occupation.

Part of the Palestine Through Film series as a part of Films at the Whitney.

1980 | Directed by Michel Khleifi | Palestine | 99 minutes | Arabic with English subtitles

Location: Humanities Quadrangle L01 (320 York St., New Haven, CT 06511)

Free and open to the public!