Old videotapes reveal what memory has made impossible to forget: Shayma’ Awawdeh was six years old when the Second Intifada erupted in Hebron, Palestine. Children play atop tanks and rubble as we hear Shayma’s voice, speaking to her mother.
In Intersecting Memory, Palestinian filmmaker Shayma’ Awawdeh attempts to reconstruct memory through a personal archive of images from the Second Intifada, opening onto a collective experience of historical violence. The footage from old tapes, together with the film’s voice-over, creates a tension between the clarity of childhood memories and the possibility – or necessity – of forgetting as a defense mechanism, or even a form of survival. The images do not exhaust themselves in their documentary value: filtered through memory, they become something else – a space where the visible coexists with what is fragmented or omitted. In the encounter between image and testimony, the film gains intensity, reactivating the collective imagination through a first-person voice that restores affect and presence. Susan Sontag argued that constant exposure to images of violence can produce a kind of collective numbness. Today, we are confronted with such images, but rarely with the duration and depth of the trauma attached to them. In this sense, the film acts as a gesture of memory’s continuity, reminding us that the resistance of the Palestinian people is by no means recent, while also testing the limits of this numbed gaze.
The result is a film that is both emotional and political: the story of a nation inscribed on the faces of Palestinian mothers, who have endured – and continue to endure – countless massacres, protecting their children as best they can from the horrors imposed upon them. (Jéssica Pestana)
