Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction

© Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction (Michel Khleifi, 1985)

Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction

The Brussels-based Palestinian-Belgian filmmaker Michel Khleifi first returned to his birthplace to make the feature film Fertile Memory (1981). A few years later, he turned his camera on the original inhabitants of Ma'loul, a small village in Galilee that was destroyed by Israel after the 1948 war.

Only once a year are residents allowed to revisit their old village, on Israeli Independence Day. In Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction, Khleifi follows them on that day, revealing a world full of painful memories. Meanwhile, young people rush to safeguard their forbidden heritage.

The screening of this short film is part of the short film programme Cinema Palestine, a collection of five shorts by young Palestinian filmmakers from Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. The films give a direct and uncensored insight into daily life on the other side of the infamous wall that divides the Middle East.

In the presence of filmmaker Michel Khleifi. The (short) films mentioned in the text, Fertile Memory and Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction, are also available to stream online via Avila.