In the early hours of May 13, 1948, the village of al-Ma’in, in the northern Negev desert, Palestine, was invaded by Israeli troops, and its inhabitants were expelled. Among them was the Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta, who, through a years-long collaboration with Forensic Architecture — a multidisciplinary collective that uses architectural tools and techniques to investigate human rights violations — reconstructed the land where he was born using 3D technology.
In this return to al-Ma’in, a Palestinian village occupied in May 1948 and almost entirely destroyed by the Haganah, the paramilitary organization of the Jewish population that would give rise to the core of the Israel Defense Forces, the memory of a place that Western history wants to make irrelevant is recovered.
Forensic Architecture is an interdisciplinary research group from Goldsmiths, University of London, that crosses architecture, human rights, journalism, art and law, which here joins Salman Abu Sitta, a defender of the Palestinian right of return, to rescue his village and show the world that his native village was a small oasis, with roads, buildings, orchards and above all a local population that had long existed there.
It is with forgetfulness and invisibility that the right to occupy territories has been justified: Israel insists on the ancestral legitimacy of occupying places where there are no physical traces of its people having existed there. The power of the biblical word does not need to override the historical evidence of the presence of the Palestinian people in that territory. It is, therefore, to prove that the Israeli occupation displaced villages and pushed their inhabitants into a now devastated land strip, that this group of researchers recovered archives and aerial images and reconstructed in a 3D model the village of al-Ma’in, which was combined with Abu Sitta’s testimony.
The film follows this process and as the village comes back to life, the past gains stories, smells and small moments, and memory goes from word to evidence. The truth shines in the enthusiasm of Salman Abu Sitta, who seems at peace with what he sees. Al-Ma’in may be destroyed, but now we can see that it exists. Perhaps now the Palestinian people can return home, even if only to this one. We shall hope! (Margarida Moz)
