“What is Our Duty Today as Viewers?”: Abdallah Al-Khatib on Cannes (ACID program)-Selected Documentary Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)

A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib — born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015 — was a sociology major at the University of Damascus when the revolution broke out in 2011. He only started documenting daily life around him after his filmmaker friend Hassan Hassan, one of the protagonists of 2013’s The Shebabs of Yarmouk, left the camp and left Al-Khatib with his camera. Subsequently, Hassan was tortured and killed by Syrian forces, while Al-Khatib was eventually smuggled out, leaving the hard disks behind to avoid the risk of confiscation. Al-Khatib only saw the footage again once he’d arrived safely in Germany. (The camera returned to Syria to keep filming without him.) Fortunately for Filmmaker, Al-Khatib (with an assist from his translator) found time just prior to the poignant doc’s Cannes debut to fill us in on the intersection of sociology and cinema, the role of media in conflict zones and the importance of asking hard questions before providing any solutions.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.