CULTURE
DUBAI in patong text and photos REEM FEKRI
CULTURE
KINGDOM OF WOMEN: REVIEW by RAWAN HADID
Arab and Indian waiters bearing the restaurants t-shirts.
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’m driving through Patong, a rather claustrophobic and somewhat soulless area of Phuket, Thailand and rather suddenly, in true Thai style, the heavens have opened up, and it starts to pour rain. It’s falling so hard I fear it might leave bruise marks all over my forehead. My scooter feels slippery on the road, and I can barely see through my fake Ray Bans. I pull into the nearest café that I could find. I run in soaked to my very core. I look up at the tacky neon sign reading “Dubai Restaurant” out loud. I laugh and look around. Dubai? In Phuket, Thailand? Of course. It’s surreal, the “kitschiness” of the décor, the smell of apple shisha in the air, the ornate gold frames that surround the portraits hanging on the wall. I sit down and order hummus, lentils and baba ganoush (eggplant dish). It’s over priced and rather terrible tasting, but I enjoy every bit of it. Because for half an hour, while the torrential rain alters my day, I’m home.
A customer sitting in what resembles a majlis, under a charcoal sketch of His Royal Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
F
ilms about Palestinian women, Palestinian refugees, and films about Ein el Hilweh Refugee Camp, are in no short supply, but Dana AbouRahme’s Kingdom of Women does speak a new visual language that sets it apart. A resoundingly satisfying visual appreciation of how the women of Ein El Hilweh have navigated their lives, the film is peppered with animations which show the viewer what the women’s stories cannot convey: memory, visual history, and feeling. The film follows the women through their lives as they tell us their stories and about their struggles and successes. Produced in collaboration with Al-Jana Arab
Institute of the Arts, the film maintains a strong sense of oral history, chronicling an element of the Palestinian experience. The largest, and most well known of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Ein el Helweh has endured war and destruction through several Israeli invasions and the Lebanese civil war. The film records the lived experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters and wives as they tell us about the complete destruction of their camp and how they rebuilt their lives and their homes. In one sense, the film can be seen as a commentary on gender in refugee camps: after the destruction of their homes , the women did what they felt they needed to do to survive. Without simply being pigeonholed in their “Palestinianness,” these women and their stories are truly inspiring. Making films about the Palestinian experience continues to be a complicated undertaking. There is no one way of being Palestinian, just as there is no one way of being a woman. As I saw this film, it was ultimately about everyday heroes fighting their every day struggles—it just so happens that these struggles take on a particularly forceful narrative when the Israeli invasions are involved. One sequence of events includes women burning the aid tents provided to them in protest of their living conditions. Here, the women taught the aid workers the lessons they needed to be taught—scenes particularly gratifying to watch. The women took their own lives and homes into their own hands and refused to have their futures dictated to them by unsympathetic aid workers. Living in tents was not going to be an option, and they made that clear. There is a history, and violence, and consequences, and this film absolutely accounts for and involves all of those, but I don’t think all our Palestinian stories should be about struggling mothers,
There is no one way of being Palestinian, just as there is no one way of being a woman. and distraught refugees. People respond to their environments and create change and that is what is inspiring. This need not always come in the form of iconic images, like Leila Khaled’s famous poster yielding a gun and draped in a keffiyeh, but also in every day struggle and resistance. Animated cartoons of Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali tell the viewer about the Israeli invasion and it’s destruction. The raw simplicity of the animations adds commanding layers to the film. We meet women who were imprisoned and women whose husbands were imprisoned while the women tended to their families. How can this be shown without physical memorabilia? They are no longer incarcerated and the houses have been rebuilt. When the women burned their tents in protest and refusal against their living conditions, they literally became the animated superheroes of their kingdom.
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His Royal Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum portrait sits next to a portrait of the Royal Thai family, a requirement in Thailand
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