Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image

The films of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Media Unit disappeared during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut. Following elusive and contradictory clues, a filmmaker searches for the missing archive, encountering myths and lived stories. With humour, she engages a tragedy she identifies with, questioning its claims while tracing how absence and exile shape memory and who is seen in history.

Azza El-Hassan:‘The narrative of dispossession, exile, war, and many other grand narratives of loss have long dominated individual Palestinian lives. The film archive through which Palestinians attempted to document their daily reality and reflect on these grand narratives went missing, and this disappearance became yet another grand narrative of loss to add to the list. Yet within grand narratives, many important details of life are forgotten. This is what Kings and Extras tries to capture: the price of trying not to lose things can be deeply personal and very high, so that you end up forgetting what you have lost while trying to preserve it at the same time.’