“Take Me Home was meant to be a short documentary, crafted as Palestinian filmmaker Mais Darwazeh’s graduation project in Edinburgh arts school. Darwazeh, as she told the audience who attended its screening in Cairo’s Journalists’ Syndicate last Tuesday, was determined to create a project about Palestine.
“I was sure that, being Palestinian, I wanted to do something on Palestine. What I didn’t realize is that although the Palestinian issue is a big issue for our generation, for the elder generation, it isn’t seen in the same way. They have done everything they could do; it is us who are not doing enough.
The final outcome of Darwazeh’s work, however, ended up being neither short, nor a crude exposition of Palestinian suffering. It is rather a delicate piece of film that filters the ramifications of the Diaspora through familial relations.
The sweeping desert steppes of Jordan as it turns to Syria mark the first few moments of “Home. An equally stirring score of the dulcet minors of an Arab female against the traditional tabla (drum) tells us where we are going. The title of the film indicates that the documentary marks a physical journey as much as being also an artistic endeavor of sorts. It’s the journey Darwazeh, a Jordanian-Palestinian, takes whenever she crosses the border to visit her grandmother and great aunt. But the beauty of Darwazeh’s film is its twisting of the concept of “home.
As Darwazeh makes the journey through the Jordanian-Syrian border, she is not “going home. And, as the journey is visually punctuated by black and white family photographs of relatives in Palestine, and later archival prints of Palestinian exiles, it becomes clear that this is not a conventional homecoming.
The journey is rather a journey of memory, steered by the film process itself. As Darwazeh, the granddaughter and director, puts her grandmother in front of the camera, she thus takes her on a voyage back to her childhood, reading the correspondences she kept with her father, exiled in Turkey.
Darwazeh’s grandmother, Wafaa, is eloquent and highly intelligent. She moves around her airy home in Damascus with frail gracefulness, and takes about her daily routine, her letters with her father, her late husband and her youth with frankness, and occasionally, in response to her granddaughter s persistent, sarcastic humor.
Responding to whether there were any physiological differences between the Palestinian girls and the Syrian ones, she replies, “we had tails between our legs, but they disappeared with time.
The domestic scene is paced by the slow movements of an old lady; the tick-tacking of a sewing machine, and the steady steaming of a pot on the boil. Aside from the scene setting desert song heard in the opening moments, Darwazeh has eschewed backing music for “Take Me Home, relying instead on the absorbing quality of testimony enhanced by natural and circumstantial noises.
In the generation of brand electronic background music used as the emotive guarantee, Darwazeh’s choice heightens our attention not only to the raw quality of the human voice, but “brings us home to a state of bare emotions.
“When I was filming my great aunt Jihad, it was clear there was a certain degree of tension, and I wanted the sound of dust to be quite prominent, the director said.
Of course, the beauty of “the sound of dust is something you probably wouldn’t pick up unless you knew it was there, but, nevertheless, it is.
Jihad is younger than Wafaa. She is a former Arab nationalist activist and sheds tears over the chaotic devastation in the Middle East. A kind of vestigial conviction, turned nostalgic regret for Arab history “gone back 1,000 years, lingers around her eyes and hangs in her husky voice.
The film is not about Palestine as it is now. The film, most essentially, is about a granddaughter’s love for her grandmother, expressed in a sudden emotion that rocks the detached calm of the director’s pose at the end of the film.
“My professor was shocked when he saw this, said Darwazeh.
Of course, this isn’t what an audience expects to see from a conventional, professional documentary. But this last exchange is an “unplanned articulation of closeness of a family that the dead hand of circumstances has rendered geographically, but not emotionally, fractured. It is the real fear of sudden death that can shake the core of any family which leaves “Take Me Home on a different note.
Home, space and the domestic sphere breathe something different into a topic, but its sheer perpetuating tragedy is conjured up regularly in film. Clinching the tragedy from a different angle, “Take Me Home is a testimony to a generation that, in Darwazeh’s words, “is stronger than us.
