A 2021 film, 92 min., in Palestinian Arabic & Hebrew with Arabic and English subtitles. Available to stream on Netflix. Written and directed by Jordanian-Palestinian Darin J. Sallam.

By Yvonne Hayes

“Everyone needs to see ‘Farha,’ because it is not a fictional story of this girl, it is my story, it is the Palestinian story,” Leila Giries told CNN. Giries is an 82-year-old Palestinian refugee who survived the 1947-48 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in the creation of Israel as a colonial-settler state.

Released for streaming by Netflix in December 2022, Farha is based on actual events. It is inspired by the story of a young Palestinian girl who witnessed the violence of the 1948 war, when about 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by armed Zionist groups in what Palestinians have since called the Nakba or “catastrophe.”

REVIEW

Farha is also a film the Israeli government does not want you to see. “Lies and libels” and a “disgrace” said then-Israeli culture minister Yehiel Tropper when the film showed at the Al Saraya Theatre in Jaffa, a majority Arab town in Israel. Its “whole purpose is to create a false pretense and incite against Israeli soldiers,” said then-Israeli finance minister Avigdor Lieberman, threatening to pull government funding from the theater.^[1]

The screening went forward, despite protesters’ attempts to stop it. But when Netflix announced it would stream the film, supporters of Israel campaigned on social media for the public to unsubscribe from the streaming service. Many gave it a thumbs-down “review” even before it was aired.

Darin J. Sallam, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, is writer and director of Farha. Now in her mid-30s, she began working on the film in 2016, despite warnings that the movie would end her career. Since its 2021 release, however, Farha has screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, received the 2022 Asia Pacific Screen Awards accolade as best youth film, was Jordan’s entry in the 2023 Oscars, and has been viewed at numerous other international events.

Farha is based on the experience of a girl named Radieh, who fled Palestine in 1948 at the age of 14. In the wake of Nakba, she made her way on foot to Syria, where she met Sallam’s mother and shared her story. Radieh’s story was retold to Sallam as a child, who in turn created the character Farha, representing Radieh and so much more.

Leading up to Nakba

Leading up to the World War II, the Roosevelt administration in the United States refused to give asylum to most Jews fleeing Nazism in Europe.^[2]

During the course of the war more than 40 million people in Europe were displaced from their homes. Two years after the war’s end, 850,000 were still living in “temporary” displacement camps. Many of these refugees were Jewish Holocaust survivors. The long-sought Zionist goal of turning Palestine into a Jewish state now coincided with the U.S. and British interest in relocating the survivors.

Just like before the war, Washington and London were not willing to provide their own shores as safe haven to many of the Jews who survived the Nazi concentration camps.

As the British empire declined and prepared to end its colonial rule in Palestine, the Zionist project became part of the rising U.S. hegemony in the region.

Prior to the end of the British mandate in 1948, the population of Palestine was about 60 percent Muslim and 33 percent Jewish (a number already inflated by post-war immigration). To shift that balance and make land available for new Jewish settlers, much of the Palestinian population was forced out of their homes and off their ancestral land.

Beginning in 1947 and into the spring of 1948, Zionist militias, and later the newly formed Israel Defense Forces, drove three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes, destroying more than 500 Arab villages and 11 urban neighborhoods — the Nakba.

By the end of that catastrophe, Israel controlled 78 percent of the former British-ruled Palestine; more than half of the original 1.3 million Arab population had been forced into exile in surrounding Arab states, challenging the politically and economically fragile infrastructure of countries newly liberated from the yoke of British imperial power.

Nakba horrors through a hole in wall, cracks in door

The film begins in a fig orchard with sounds of a stream and waterfall intermingled with the laughter of young girls picking the luscious fruit. Farha — whose name means “joy” — sits against one of the trees, engrossed in a book. Rather than marriage and a hearth, she dreams of going to the city to study and come back to her village as a teacher, to establish a school for girls.

Returning from the fields, Farha and her friends see a group of boys chasing a departing British regiment with slingshots and toy guns, celebrating the end of colonial rule. But celebration is cut short. Farha’s dreams, her innocence, and her joy are stripped away as her village comes under attack by Zionist forces.

Farha’s father locks her in a storage room to protect her from the onslaught. The lush green and bright colors of the film’s opening scenes give way to darkness.

It is from the darkness of her hiding place that Farha hears gunfire and bomb blasts in the surrounding village. Through cracks in the door and a ventilation hole near the ceiling — and often through tears — she witnesses the brutality and the contradictions of the Nakba: the massacre of a Palestinian family trying to flee the devastation; the betrayal of her people by a Palestinian collaborator, hooded to protect his identity; and glimpses of humanity in some of those carrying out the assault. In that dark and terrifying space, Farha makes the passage from child to woman.

During most of the film, Farha — played by Karam Taher — bears witness. She does not speak, but body language and facial expressions tell her story. We see the Nakba unfold from Farha’s vantage point, from the darkness that surrounds her.

While the inspiration for the film was Radieh’s experience, Farha’s journey represents the story of an entire people, driven from their homes and land, killed or forced into exile, often not knowing what might have become of their loved ones.

From her hideaway, Farha sees Israeli militia members search a woman for weapons, only to discover a large key hidden between her breasts — the key to her family home, a home to which she will never return.

This key tells the story of a nation displaced, hundreds of thousands who lost homes and farms, who locked their front doors and fled 75 years ago. Many in the Palestinian diaspora today have similar keys, passed down to them by parents or grandparents, symbols of the collective trauma of a people.

When the militia enter Farha’s courtyard, a hooded Palestinian collaborator attempts to soften the assault on the family found sheltering there. He is a reminder of a complicated and painful part of the Nakba — friends and family members who chose to collaborate with the Zionist forces to save their own necks or perhaps hoping their loved ones would be spared.

Farha also witnesses the moral crisis of a young Jewish soldier, wavering when he is ordered to kill a newborn infant in her courtyard. He, too, is a victim of forces — global in scope — over which he has no more control than Farha.

Ironic parallels

As I watched, I was struck by the irony of the parallels between this narrative and the story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl, also with hopes and dreams, whose passage into womanhood took place while hiding in Amsterdam.

Born in Germany in 1929, Anne’s family fled Germany in 1934 after the Nazis took power. Following Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands, as the situation for Jews became increasingly dangerous, the family went into hiding. Anne began to spend most of her days concealed in an attic with her diary. In 1944, the family was arrested and transported. Anne and her sister died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Anne Frank’s story is also the story of a people who carry collective trauma — even generations later — and who are now pitted against Farha’s people by imperialist powers whose interests align neither with that of the Jewish or the Palestinian peoples.

This film is hard to watch. But because it tells the story of a people whose reality has been largely overlooked or denied, it is important that we bear witness with Farha.

This is especially true today, as Israel wages a brutal war with increasingly genocidal consequences in Gaza — posing the threat of a new Nakba — in response to the barbaric October 7 attack by Hamas.

‘Our stories need to be heard’

Like the girl portrayed in Farha, Leila Giries became a refugee who has passed on her story from generation to generation. She told CNN that she wonders daily what life would have been like if her family had not been forced to leave their home in Ein Karem, now part of Jerusalem.

The bag Giries’ mother grabbed for her as they ran from the burning village is now framed and hanging on a wall in her California home, alongside the key to the family home in Palestine, destroyed in the 1948 war and now just a pile of rubble.

Like most Palestinian refugees, Giries does not have the right to return to her ancestral home, to live in Israel. But she is more fortunate than most. Many Palestinian refugees and their descendants — nearly 6 million people, according to United Nations statistics — are forced to live in U.N. camps in Gaza and the West Bank (Israeli-occupied territories) and in neighboring countries.

“We don’t care who tells us it isn’t true,” Giries said. “We lived it, and our stories need to be heard because the injustice against Palestinians did not end with al-Nakba and it is far from over.”

Sallam’s telling of that story is simple, focused not on the brutality of the invaders but the trauma of a people. In Taher’s film debut, her portrayal of the main character is unforgettable — the dreams, the fears, the agony of a people stripped of their land and homes, the innocence of childhood, their delight, their farha.

NOTES

[1] For more information on the Israeli campaign to censor Farha watch the Al-Jazeera YouTube video “Why Israel Tried Canceling Netflix Film Farha.”

[2] For the record of the fight to open U.S. borders to refugees from Hitler’s terror, see Socialists and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism: An Answer to the B’Nai B’Rith Anti-Defamation League.

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