Palestinian cinema and its sumud archives

an approach based on three women directors

Abstract

Based on the trajectories of three Palestinian women, Sulafa Jadallah, Khadijeh Habashneh and Azza El-Hassan, who have worked/are working with cinema, this paper investigates how the forms and contents of the archival structure of Palestinian cinema often operates from counter-colonial strategies. To this end, it aims to make a more in-depth analysis of some of the narrative resources used in Azza El-Hassan's feature film Kings & Extras (2004). In our analysis of this very artwork, we shall connect some aspects of the film with the lacunar qualities of the concept of archive, put forward both in Derrida's Freudian analysis (2001) and in those developed by Foucault (1987). Finally, the text crosses these concepts with the notion of sumud, a Palestinian way of existing which, in this case, ends up producing specificities in the ways in which archives are used in cinema made by Palestinian directors.