Jenin Jenin + The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived

Jenin, Jenin is a 2002 testimonial documentary about the consequences of the IDF Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002 against the refugee camp Jenin. After the attack, the IDF refused to allow journalists and humanitarian organizations access to the camp for several days ("for safety reasons"). This included a UN fact-finding mission. The camp remained sealed, which prompted rumors that there has been a massacre. This military campaign came during the second Intifada, a major uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. 

Director Mohammed Bakri becomes witness to the unfolding events and eventually decides to sneak into Jenin in order to find out what really happened. Armed with a small camera, he interviews people inside, asking a single question: "What happened?" The result is a film-collage of answers to this question with an absence of an interviewer; a record of a story that would have otherwise remained sealed. At the forefront is always the Palestinian perspective with the film consisting entirely of the affected peoples' accounts and opinions; there is crucially no interview of Israeli officials. 

The film interviews people spanning generations with different jobs and perspectives about the same events, showcasing the true horrors of oppression reaching everyone, from cradle to crone. There is a diversity of emotions; sadness, anger, confusion, hopelessness and occasional happiness in captured moments of distraction. That the film gives the survivors space to feel their emotions and hold opinions without sanitizing them - and recognize their pain regardless, is perhaps what's most valuable, and what film as a document really is about.

Mohammed Bakri

2003

54 min

Arabic dialogue, English subtitles

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived is an incredible, little known document about a forgotten revolution. Heiny Srour, along with her French cameraman, crossed 800 km of desert and mountain, from the South Yemeni border into both liberated and conflict zones along the red line, in order to record the mostly forgotten Marxist-Leninist Dhofar rebellion in Oman. The documentary’s focus is on the women fighting for independence against the colonial oppression of the Omani regime, which was supported by the British government. At once a testament to the women’s strength and an exploration of the role of oil and US and British involvement in the Middle East, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived shows how liberation is found in an organically revolutionized practice of daily life, rather than in single acts of grandeur.

This is the first film by an Arab woman to be selected and screened at the Cannes film festival in 1974. After its world premiere in Cannes, the film was shown in multiple festivals and institutions around the world. Among the film’s many merits is what Dr. Abdel Razzaq Takriti called the “reconceptualization of the image of the revolutionary (...) which in other contexts was typically that of a young man with long hair and rough beard. Here, it is instead that of a fatigue-wearing young woman with huge questioning eyes, sporting a short haircut and carrying a Kalashnikov.”

Heiny Srour

1974

62 min

Arabic dialogue, English subtitles