We Will Remain & Dancing Palestine

We Will Remain (dir. Bashar Zarour, 2024)

We Will Remain intimately portrays the threatened Palestinian Bedouin communities scattered across the Jerusalem desert in the West Bank. As illegal settlements encroach upon their land, these communities confront an extreme coercive environment designed to uproot them, with potentially far-reaching consequences on the entire Palestinian people. Firsthand accounts and interviews reveal the Bedouins’ enduring and remarkable determination to stay on their land in the face of relentless harassment and eviction pressure. The film sheds light on the broader implications while championing the need for justice and cultural preservation.

There will be an introduction by executive producer, Dr Brendan Ciarán Browne (Assistant Professor & Fellow of Trinity College Dublin).

Dancing Palestine (dir. Lamees Almakkawy, 2024)

In a culture continually threatened with erasure, dancing the dabke, the traditional folk dance of Palestine, becomes an essential form of resistance for young Palestinians.

To dance is to remember. To dance is to remind. As the Palestinian identity continues to be threatened with violent erasure, young Palestinians turn to their folk dance, the dabke, to assert their existence. In this acclaimed, award-nominated short film director Lamees Almakkawy documents the dabke from its humble beginnings as a worker’s dance, to today where it represents an ever-evolving history of cultural resistance.

Dancing Palestine is a document of this embodiment of collective memory – as those who piece together a dabke choreography also piece together their identities. Together with the film – a performance in itself – the dabke is a testament to Palestinians’ deep love of life and an insistent act of contribution to the archive of Palestine in the present. As the film itself states: “When everything is taken from you what remains is your body. When home is gone the body becomes home.”

Age 18+.

Part of Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics>>