Читать книгу The Dream - Mohammad Malas - Страница 9

Preface

I never understood how or why the idea for the film I was about to make took root inside me. It was supposed to be about a Palestinian family, and I was on my way to Beirut.

I vividly recall that moment in the car when the memory of Tel al-Zaatar appeared before me, out of nowhere, like a dream.

Drifting between bitter memory and the merciless collapse of an idea for a film that I was on route to Beirut to make, I shrank behind the windshield and soaked in the warm morning sun. When I reached al-Watani Street,¹ or ‘the Last Street,’ as members of the Resistance in Beirut called it, this street seemed to me like a parenthetical aside inserted into a dream.

I went down the street alone, trying to grasp the images and motions—the balconies, people’s clothing and uniforms, their guns, the loudspeakers, bookshops, women . . . I contemplated the lives lived in the twists and turns of this ‘Last Street’ and was filled with dreams of making a film.

When I talked to an official at the media center about finding a Palestinian family in one of the camps to film,² I realized I was discussing an idea that had already died. The old idea was evaporating while a new one rapidly metastasized inside me.

At the time, fresh posters about historic Palestine were being printed, coming off the presses like hot delicious bread. Preparations for Land Day celebrations had begun, and Israeli warplanes hovered in the sky above.

Nothing changes on al-Watani Street, this last street that eats its daily bread with one hand, closing with its other the brackets of that parenthetical aside.