Partition

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with oral histories recorded in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Through story, voice and song, the film reclaims Palestinian presence, unsettling colonial archives and reflecting on what bodies remember — and what empires forget.

Diana Allan: ‘I use sound to reanimate and recontextualise these colonial images, interrogating archival authority, relocating these archives in the present, and restoring to song its political power. This move to sound-silent footage with the reverberations of Palestinian life as it is remembered, lived, and anticipated, is an attempt to reconnect people, places, and temporality through the senses. The film is about this experiential aspect of the archive, what it means to encounter one’s own past, and how the significance of that encounter might speak back to the present. You feel the weight of history in people’s voices in how they speak, the deep suffering that people have gone through.The living archive builds its forms in synchrony with existing forms in the life of the camp, which is fundamentally different from the salvage paradigm. It adopts the model of preservation, diffusion, and circulation through imaginative engagement rather than consolidation and conservation. These histories are carried in bodies and they are transmitted through bodies, and that will continue to happen.’– Excerpted from Incé Husain, ‘“Ongoing Return”: A Living Archive of Palestine’. Antler River Media Co-Op, 7 May 2025.