Mira Sidawi

Mira Sidawi is a Palestinian actress, writer, and director. Sidawi was born to a Palestinian family in the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. She was named, by her mother, after an eponymous character played by actress Hind Abi Llama in a Lebanese television series. Her father fled Sheij Danun, a town near Acre (today in northern Israel), in 1948 at the beginning of Nakba during which more than 700,000 palestinians were displaced after Zionist forces conquered territory to establish the State of Israel. After leaving his home with no belongings, he set up a storefront in the countryside where he met and married Sidawi’s mother, who was also from Acre. The family was forced to flee to the mountains following the Lebanese civil war. “My father made a house of tin and stones, in which it was very cold in winter and we suffocated in summer,” Sidawi told El Pais, “We were very poor. I helped him clean other people's bathrooms by listening to Umm Kulthum's music. He was a fascinating man, who wanted to be a writer, but he couldn't. It is impossible to know what happened before, who he played with or what he dreamed of. You don't know what he left there, in that first part of his life.” Before he was killed, along with her sister, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, he taught Sidawi how to walk inside the refugee camp alleys without falling into open holes or being bitten by rats. Sidawi studied theatre at the Lebanese American University and worked as a trainer in media workshops across the Shatilla refugee camp. Sidawi’s first short film Four Wheels Camp (2015) was conceived as a tribute to her father and showcases the plight of palestinian refugees who wish to be buried in their homeland instead of a camp. “My parents are buried on my two brothers, who died before, because in the countryside there is no place to bury otherwise. Dead on dead. It scares me to have no choice and end up like this. I told my mother that I didn't want that for me, and that's where the film was born,” she explained. Four Wheels Camp was selected to be screened at the Festival Ciné-Palestine in Paris and Beirut University Film Festival, winning the jury prize and the audience award respectively. In 2024, it was one of the films screened at the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain, as part of a colloquium organized by the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA).