Al-Nakba Mustamirra
On Diana Allan’s Partition
Lilly Markaki
Partition
Director DIANA ALLAN
Year
2025
Country LEBANON, PALESTINE
The first image we encounter is
a landscape. Its circular frame betrays its origins in a colonial archive.
Telescopes have long been employed in military contexts for observation and
strategic planning. Despite its built-in claim to objectivity and scientific
neutrality, the telescopic view is thus inextricably linked to military power
and the imperial, colonial gaze. Over this landscape, a voice speaks: “I had forgotten, but now, in
this moment, I remember everything.” The voice belongs to a Palestinian, and
their words announce not only the work of memory that the film—directed,
edited, and produced by Diana Allan—engages in, but its intervention in the
ostensibly neutral field of vision (and archive) presented to us.
Combining documentary footage captured during the British occupation of Palestine (1917-1948) with oral testimonies, song, and ambient soundscapes recorded over the past two decades in the refugee camps of Lebanon by the Nakba Archive, Partition commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Nakba: the catastrophic event that saw the systematic destruction of Palestinian life by Israeli settlers through the demolition of towns and villages, the forced expulsion of nearly one million Palestinians, and the mass killing of thousands. The film's title refers not only to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which divided Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, and the ethnic cleansing it introduced, but also to the partitions of memory and experience that Palestinians, torn from their homes, land, and loved ones, have endured and continue to endure. I recall the words of Elias Sanbar—“In 1948 our country was not merely occupied but was somehow disappeared”—and of Edward Said—“Invisibility is the fate [Palestinians] have resisted since the beginning.”
Re-photographed on 16mm film and remade through various hand-processing techniques, the images that Allan reclaims foreshadow this central traumatic event of the Nakba. In spite of their provenance in British and Israeli colonial archives, these images establish the basic fact of Palestinian presence, affirming Palestinians’ memory of life on ancestral land while redressing the (broken) record that lends credence to the Zionist fantasy of a “land without a people.” Allan, however, does not rely on the sheer transparency of this evidence to oppose the active erasure, both official and cultural, of the violence of the Nakba. Remediated by Allan, the images that Partition networks are offered as mnemonic traces to be deciphered and interpreted alongside the film’s Palestinian narrators, in an active reconstruction of the past that inevitably enfolds the present and future.
Entering into a dialectical confrontation with the visual, the film’s soundscape simultaneously invests images with meaning and takes meaning away from them, as the displaced narrators' lived experiences spill over, contaminating the archive. This unarchiving current—engaging the archive through speculation and partial, embodied viewpoints—gives way to a narrative that feeds forward, into the present. “Now, in this moment, I remember everything.” What is remembered is not simply the past but, precisely, this “now”—for the ongoing nature of the Palestinian catastrophe precludes the possibility of closure. “Al-Nakba mustamirra”—meaning “the catastrophe continues”—is a widely echoed expression among Palestinians and scholars of Palestinian cultural memory. As Adam HajYahia notes, “the Nakba’s overbearing pre-eminence cannot be contained between particular days in 1948 or between ‘then’ and ‘now.’ The catastrophe bleeds into any imagination of a Palestinian past, and as long as the Nakba is present, all temporalities will be read, interpreted, and imagined in relation to it.”
Allan’s decision to work with visual documents from the Mandate period serves to situate Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians within a long legacy of violence that intimately ties the Zionist project to Western colonialism. This perspective—supported by Sanbar, Gilles Deleuze, Ilan Pappé, and others—is not only historically accurate but also politically important. For those of us viewing the film from the comfort of theatres in the imperial core, Partition raises difficult questions. As Palestinian filmmaker Omar al-Qattan asks (in a separate context), “Where am I in this struggle? Where are the Palestinian people and what relationship do I have/can I have with them?” Will I be a spectator, or an active witness?
Part of the beauty of Allan’s formally masterful film is that the voices it gathers are not those of victims. If Partition is a record of loss and of the memory of a people on the edge—then as now—of disappearance, it is also an envelope of a militant, enduring desire for the long return to Palestine, as expressed in the song of the camel driver beautifully sung by Amal Kaawash in the film, and for the end of partition. It is not trauma but the promise of al-’awda (the Return) that structures the film. This promise, moreover, is not for a return to the past—easily idealised—of a people in harmony with the land, where “everyone would plant around their houses…liv[ing] in God’s abundance,” as recalled by one of the film’s narrators. It is future-oriented. “Palestinian return,” as HajYahia reminds us, “is not an act of reversal as such—the relapse to a time prior to exile and dispossession—but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility. It is the redemption of the past in the present and the future …”
Again, who am I in relation to this call—for a politics of justice and of freedom?
Partition does not culminate in redemption in al-’awda, but in another kind of return: the reappearance of images previously glimpsed in the film, now altered, made strange. Recycled through the film’s own mnemonic structure, these images take on a ghostly quality. Their resurfacing—in the negative, and accompanied by unsettling auditory cues—signals the coming catastrophe, its unfolding across both past and present. The violence of partition is not over. A demand is made of the viewer—not merely for recognition, but for a proper reckoning.
“Victory,” one of Partition’s voices reminds us, “lasts only for the just.”
A warning, and a future.
Lilly Markaki is a writer, curator and lecturer, working in the Dept. of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Partition at Close-Up Cinema, 8 May 2025.
Combining documentary footage captured during the British occupation of Palestine (1917-1948) with oral testimonies, song, and ambient soundscapes recorded over the past two decades in the refugee camps of Lebanon by the Nakba Archive, Partition commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Nakba: the catastrophic event that saw the systematic destruction of Palestinian life by Israeli settlers through the demolition of towns and villages, the forced expulsion of nearly one million Palestinians, and the mass killing of thousands. The film's title refers not only to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which divided Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, and the ethnic cleansing it introduced, but also to the partitions of memory and experience that Palestinians, torn from their homes, land, and loved ones, have endured and continue to endure. I recall the words of Elias Sanbar—“In 1948 our country was not merely occupied but was somehow disappeared”—and of Edward Said—“Invisibility is the fate [Palestinians] have resisted since the beginning.”
Re-photographed on 16mm film and remade through various hand-processing techniques, the images that Allan reclaims foreshadow this central traumatic event of the Nakba. In spite of their provenance in British and Israeli colonial archives, these images establish the basic fact of Palestinian presence, affirming Palestinians’ memory of life on ancestral land while redressing the (broken) record that lends credence to the Zionist fantasy of a “land without a people.” Allan, however, does not rely on the sheer transparency of this evidence to oppose the active erasure, both official and cultural, of the violence of the Nakba. Remediated by Allan, the images that Partition networks are offered as mnemonic traces to be deciphered and interpreted alongside the film’s Palestinian narrators, in an active reconstruction of the past that inevitably enfolds the present and future.
Entering into a dialectical confrontation with the visual, the film’s soundscape simultaneously invests images with meaning and takes meaning away from them, as the displaced narrators' lived experiences spill over, contaminating the archive. This unarchiving current—engaging the archive through speculation and partial, embodied viewpoints—gives way to a narrative that feeds forward, into the present. “Now, in this moment, I remember everything.” What is remembered is not simply the past but, precisely, this “now”—for the ongoing nature of the Palestinian catastrophe precludes the possibility of closure. “Al-Nakba mustamirra”—meaning “the catastrophe continues”—is a widely echoed expression among Palestinians and scholars of Palestinian cultural memory. As Adam HajYahia notes, “the Nakba’s overbearing pre-eminence cannot be contained between particular days in 1948 or between ‘then’ and ‘now.’ The catastrophe bleeds into any imagination of a Palestinian past, and as long as the Nakba is present, all temporalities will be read, interpreted, and imagined in relation to it.”
Allan’s decision to work with visual documents from the Mandate period serves to situate Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians within a long legacy of violence that intimately ties the Zionist project to Western colonialism. This perspective—supported by Sanbar, Gilles Deleuze, Ilan Pappé, and others—is not only historically accurate but also politically important. For those of us viewing the film from the comfort of theatres in the imperial core, Partition raises difficult questions. As Palestinian filmmaker Omar al-Qattan asks (in a separate context), “Where am I in this struggle? Where are the Palestinian people and what relationship do I have/can I have with them?” Will I be a spectator, or an active witness?
Part of the beauty of Allan’s formally masterful film is that the voices it gathers are not those of victims. If Partition is a record of loss and of the memory of a people on the edge—then as now—of disappearance, it is also an envelope of a militant, enduring desire for the long return to Palestine, as expressed in the song of the camel driver beautifully sung by Amal Kaawash in the film, and for the end of partition. It is not trauma but the promise of al-’awda (the Return) that structures the film. This promise, moreover, is not for a return to the past—easily idealised—of a people in harmony with the land, where “everyone would plant around their houses…liv[ing] in God’s abundance,” as recalled by one of the film’s narrators. It is future-oriented. “Palestinian return,” as HajYahia reminds us, “is not an act of reversal as such—the relapse to a time prior to exile and dispossession—but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility. It is the redemption of the past in the present and the future …”
Again, who am I in relation to this call—for a politics of justice and of freedom?
Partition does not culminate in redemption in al-’awda, but in another kind of return: the reappearance of images previously glimpsed in the film, now altered, made strange. Recycled through the film’s own mnemonic structure, these images take on a ghostly quality. Their resurfacing—in the negative, and accompanied by unsettling auditory cues—signals the coming catastrophe, its unfolding across both past and present. The violence of partition is not over. A demand is made of the viewer—not merely for recognition, but for a proper reckoning.
“Victory,” one of Partition’s voices reminds us, “lasts only for the just.”
A warning, and a future.
Lilly Markaki is a writer, curator and lecturer, working in the Dept. of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Partition at Close-Up Cinema, 8 May 2025.