Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba

The film imagines a century after the Nakba, as a deceased grandmother navigates her hometown Haifa through Google Street View — the only remaining way to see Palestine. Her disembodied voice wanders digital streets, searching for a son born in 1948, and for a geography erased from history yet preserved through spectral imagination.

Razan Alsalah: ‘This was my first film; I initially didn't know I was making a film. What mattered was finding a way to return my grandmother to Palestine. In retrospect, now I understand this film as establishing the ethic of my filmmaking practice in collective recollection—rather than in scripted narrative or documentary witnessing. It's something in-between. Similarly, my grandmother's voice was something that was both enacted and written. I immersed myself in our stories, our collective histories, archival research, the interview with Amine, critical historical research, and Google Streetview's inherent modes of production, and encountered the image as I knew teta would have: at the moment of her escape, as it coincides with her moment of return. Remembering and returning are inextricably linked. ’