Homeland of Barbed Wire

At a glance

Homeland of Barbed Wire, is a 1980 Palestinian movie, directed by Qais Al-Zubaidi. with a runtime of 61 minutes.

Overview

Homeland of Barbed Wire is a Palestinian documentary directed by Kais Al-Zubaidi, made under remarkable constraints: Palestinian filmmakers affiliated with PLO cinema organisations were barred from entering Israeli-administered territories, so Al-Zubaidi dispatched a West German film crew to do the work in the territories occupied in 1967. The crew recorded the testimonies of Palestinian peasants who had lost their farmland and meadows, and refugees facing further forced displacement eastward from camps they had inhabited since 1948 — while Israeli settlers referred to their newly acquired land as "liberated territory." The film offers a quietly powerful visual account of dispossession, identity, and the contested meaning of liberation, making it a landmark in Palestinian political documentary cinema.

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