“That’s my favourite comment,” says Darin J. Sallam over Zoom – speaking of her film Farha (2021), which is showing at the Larnaca Municipal Theatre tomorrow at 8pm.
The film will be screened in the presence of the mayor of Larnaca, the ambassador of Palestine to Cyprus, and Sallam herself, who’ll be flying in from Jordan for the screening.
Farha is a film – one of the handful of films – about the Nakba, the violent displacement of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It’s played some of the world’s biggest film festivals, from Busan to Toronto, and has streamed globally on Netflix since December 2022. It was also Jordan’s official submission to the Oscars.
“Many people come and say ‘I love this film, I cried’,” recalls Sallam. Or they might say: “‘This film is reconnecting generations. I watched it with my father and grandmother, three different generations, and we cried together’. And a Nakba survivor said: ‘I’m Farha’” – the name of the 14-year-old girl in the movie – “‘and they can’t deny my existence!’. Many, many emotional comments.”
But her ‘favourite comment’, like she says, is the one she hears – and she’s heard it often, in the three years since the film came out – from non-Palestinians.
“From the world premiere, I knew that this was an eye-opener.” Audience members came to chat with her at the premiere in Toronto, standing in the foyer after the Q&A, “and we kept talking and talking, and they asked me questions and they said: ‘We never knew’.
“‘We never knew about this. We thought it’s just a conflict, a Palestinian-Israeli conflict… We never knew, we learned from this film’.”
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government made a concerted effort to attack Farha, and Sallam herself.
There were angry statements by cabinet ministers, a campaign to downvote the film at the Internet Movie Database, withdrawal of funding for a theatre in Tel Aviv that had scheduled screenings, and what the filmmakers called an “onslaught of hateful messages, harassment, accusations and bullying on social media”. This was in late November 2022, obviously aimed at getting Netflix to back out of the streaming deal. Fortunately, Netflix stood firm.
Yet Farha is also a coming-of-age drama, ‘the story of a girl whose dream of an education in the city changes to survival,’ to quote the logline.
“When I used to pitch the film,” says Sallam, “I always said: ‘I’m not a politician, I’m an artist. And I’m not going to talk about politics’.”
That said, the line is inevitably blurred when it comes to Palestine. Sallam grew up in Kuwait, in what sounds like a solidly middle-class family – but her dad is indeed a Nakba survivor, and what led her to filmmaking was apparently the second intifada of the early 00s (she was just a kid, born in 1987) which so overwhelmed and disturbed her that she started drawing in order to exorcise the images.
Farha is political, of course – though not, she insists, in the narrow sense. “My intention was to tell the truth about my people. About this nation, that went through a traumatic event” which (she says) has been buried and marginalised, both in films and everyday discourse. Even some of the teenage Palestinian girls she met while casting the movie were hazy on the details of what happened in 1948 – though of course teenage girls tend to be hazy about everything.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, the reason why a three-year-old film is being screened in Larnaca now. The shocking war in Gaza – which “is not a war,” says Sallam emphatically, “it’s really important not to call it a war… It’s an aggression, it’s an occupation” – part of the ongoing history whose origins feature in Farha.
“The Nakba,” she explains, “never ended.”
