Montreal Critic’s Week – Mémoire fertile

Occupied Territories Program – January 18
16h30 – Fujiyama Cotton
18h30 – Mémoire fertile
20h30 – Spiders Web
Individual ticket (one ticket per film)

Written in 1978, Fertile Memory is the first film shot by a Palestinian director within the borders of the West Bank. Neither documentary nor fiction, Michel Khleifi instead films the lives of two women who resist in their own distinct ways: Farah Hatoum, a widow who cares for her children and grand-children and still hopes to recover her land expropriated by Israel in 1948, as well as Sahar Khalifeh, Palestinian novelist (Wild Thorns; The Inheritance; The End of Spring) who proudly lives on occupied territory. Within this contrast between mother and intellectual, domesticity and discourse, Khleifi captures essential images of Palestinian life, as well as the commonality of existence under apartheid, as a constant quest for freedom and dignity.

*Semaine de la critique du Festival de Cannes, 1981