Country: France, Egypt
Year: 2003
Duration: 278'
The history of the Palestinians, of their forced
migration from the camps of Galilee to Lebanon over a period of 50 years
of hardship, hope and love. The film tells the personal stories of
Younès, a fighter who is entrenched in Lebanon, a clandestine fighter
for his country; of Nahila, his young wife, in endless flight with her
landless people; of Khalil, who nurses Younès, who is in a coma, in
Beirut; of Shams, whom Khalil loved and who was executed by his fellow
fighters. A wide-ranging and epic film, intensely political and poetic.
The film is divided into two parts: The Departure and The Return.
"I began writing the Screenplay with Elias Khoury and Mohamed Soueid. We
wanted to write a fiction story, and there was no reason not to, even
though we were writing about the Palestinians. But people don't like
fiction […]. The fact is that we are expected to always be exclusively
reporters, ambassadors, judges, everything except narrators. It seems
like a sort of repression to me, a fear of living: we cannot write
stories, we can only comment upon them. There is nothing more
disconcerting and upsetting than fiction." (Y. Nasrallah)
Biography
film director
Yousry Nasrallah
Yousry Nasrallah (Cairo, Egypt, 1952), after graduating in economics and political science from the University of Cairo, studied at the Cairo Film Institute and in 1978 moved to Lebanon, where he worked as a journalist. In 1981, he was assistant director for Volker Schlöndorff on the film Circle of Deceit and production assistant for Youssef Chahine on La mémoire. In 1988 he made his first film, Summer Thefts, selected for the Quinzaine des réalisateurs, while in 1989 his film El Medina won the jury prize in Locarno. His films have been screened at various international festivals, including the Torino Film Festival, which in 2004 presented his TV movie The Gate of the Sun, while Venice and Toronto presented Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story. After the Battle was an official selection at the past Cannes Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Sarikat Sayfeya (Summer Thefts, 1988), Marcides (Mercedes, 1993), Sobyan wa banat (On Boys, Girls and the Veil, 1995), El Medina (1999), Bab el chams (La porta del sole, tv, 2004), Genenet al asmak (The Aquarium, 2008), Ehky ya Scheherazade (Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story, 2009), 18 Days (ep. Interior/Exterior, cm, 2011), Baad el Mawkeaa (After the Battle, 2012).