Palestinian Animation: Forms of Resilience
Thursday, 26. 9. 2023 at 14.00 / Vetrinj mansion, big hall
Facing and experiencing shortages of knowledge, the silencing of Palestinian voices, inaccessibility of information, and mismatched interpretative methods in understanding Palestinian art and culture, the StopTrik team decided to hold a panel that will shed light on the community of Palestinian animators who have not been sufficiently acknowledged or have not had the opportunity to be heard or seen.
Film festivals are canon-building practices and as such they frequently reproduce fixed points of view, reinforce hierarchies and cement prior patterns of recognition. Festivals have difficulties in addressing controversial issues. So let’s do it differently here at StopTrik. Any questions we might have about the animated works made by artists in Gaza, the West Bank and diaspora can now be addressed to Samira Badran, a Palestinian visual artist based in Barcelona and director of the animated film Memory of the Land (2017, Spain), Ahmad Saleh, a Palestinian animator living between Saudi Arabia, Germany and Jordan and Patrizia Roletti, artistic director of Nazra Palestine Short Film Festival from Italy.
We should start with the basics – what are the specifics of Palestinian cinema and what are the visual and audiovisual traditions of Palestinian animation? What kind of artistic influences are specific to animators in Palestine and the diaspora? How do these groups differ in their strategies of representation? Which schools, educational centers and film festivals play a crucial role in the development of Palestinian animation’s identity? How much opportunity is there for Palestinian filmmakers / animators and artists in general to tell their stories and the story of the occupation and apartheid? How is animation used as an emancipatory tool for social and political change? What is the role of the filmmaking industry (and within the animation industry) in shifting the international perception on what is going on in the occupied Palestinian territories ? How can we support the Palestinian animation community?
The panel will also feature a video from Haneen Koraz, a stop motion educator and trainer who as an internally displaced person lived at the refugee camp in Deir al-Balah. Haneen Koraz is an experienced stop motion filmmaker who has collaborated with various arts and culture associations working in Gaza (among them Theatre Day Productions; she is a recipient of Cooperation Award for Excellence in Cultural Sector 2022 of the Taawon Welfare Association). Her efforts especially focused on empowerment of women and young girls with hearing impairments. In the camp, Haneen and her team (Nour A-Jawad and Shorook Darwish) led animation workshops for women and children to help them cope with the horrors they have experienced. On August 22, 2024 people in the camp were forced to evacuate, Haneen, Nour, and Shorook, even though displaced again, continue their work. . From May to August 2024 four workshop films have been released online, among them A Day in the Tent. This workshop film presents children’s daily experiences in the refugee camp. The kids speak in this film about the lack of sleep, dirty lavatories, queuing in the heat, adults’ anger, nights filled with hunger. They do so in a way children usually talk about all kinds of things – by making jokes, mocking their parents, animating characters drawn with vibrant, intense color palette. “Oh my head, my heart, what will we do today,” cries the Mother in the final scene, and this heart-breaking line was also written to the story by the participating children. You will find more about Haneen Koraz and her activities at the refugee camp:
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It was 2024, April 23; a person unknown to me, Haneen Koraz, sent me a friend invite on Facebook. She is an animator who wanted to share a fundraising campaign. But nothing was ordinary about this social media interaction. I started asking myself questions about Haneen. Online research, even if conducted only in English, immediately gave me answers.
This is how I e-met Haneen, a stop motion animator engaged in art education and social change, who, from her posts and articles written about her, appears as a woman of courage. Nidal Al-Mughrabi wrote for “Reuters” in March 2021:A group of Palestinian women with hearing loss are using stop motion animation to make short films about their condition to teach children about it. (…) The group's trainer, Haneen Koraz, said the project offered the women a way to promote their cause and pursue their ambitions through art and creativity. In Gaza she has worked with NGOs, schools, and an art association Theatre Day Productions. In April 2023 she received the Cooperation Award for Excellence in Cultural Sector 2022 granted by the Taawon Welfare Association (a non-profit, civic organization launched in Geneva in 1983). A fundraiser set by Haneen’s brother lists her major professional achievements. Becoming an IDP (internally displaced person), fleeing for her life, losing the studio, equipment, and tools, Haneen Koraz lived until August 22 in Deir al-Balah. Alaa Salamah of “Socialist Worker” reported in May 2024: Inside a small tent in the Deir-al Balah district of Gaza, five volunteers working in the arts have tried to create a space where children can express their emotions and imagination. Amid war Palestinian children are finding respite as they gather in circles to talk, laugh, draw, paint and create stories.
The life in the camp is unimaginable to me; one needs to turn to research once again. UN Office in Geneva states on August 12: UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, issued a statement from Deir al-Balah in Gaza’s central area, where “untreated sewage run-off formed large pools on the road next to shelters for forcibly displaced people. Sewage water is all over the streets” said UNICEF spokesperson Salim Oweis, who highlighted the destruction of Gaza’s water and sanitation network, and its sewage treatment plants.
A Day in the Tent was released by Haneen Koraz on May 9. The children’s stories focus on their daily experiences in the refugee camp. The kids speak in this film about the lack of sleep, dirty lavatories, queuing in the heat, adults’ anger, nights filled with hunger. They do so in a way children usually talk about all kinds of things – by making jokes, mocking their parents, animating characters drawn with vibrant, intense color palette. Oh my head, my heart, what will we do today, cries the Mother in the final scene, and this heart-breaking line was also written to the story by the participating children.
Haneen Koraz works now with the support of her friends, among them: Nour A-Jawad and Shorook Darwish. This trio tirelessly motivates and supports children and women to resist despair with cut-out animation. From May to August three more works have been released: Queues, The Knot, The Kids Have Fixed It. You can watch the showreel on StopTrik’s youtube.
On August 22, people in the camp were once again forced to evacuate. Displaced, Haneen and friends did not lose the strength to continue organizing spaces and tools and they are continuing their work.
I hope you will consider donating to Haneen Koraz’s cause and/or sharing her story. I hope that one day we will meet with Haneen and her friends in person.
Olga Bobrowska
The following is a selection of Haneen Koraz’s facebook posts (some posts were automatically-translated from Arabic).
September 2,
We are now working as a team, with 8 workshops running across the Gaza Strip. The first workshop is being led by my colleague, the artist Manar, and her assistant Sally, who are currently working at an UNRWA school used as a shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp. They are working with children aged 9 to 12 years, teaching them how to create cartoons using paper, especially since there are no recreational places for them to play. The children watch cartoons on one of the trainers' mobile phones due to the lack of a display screen. Animation workshops with kids in Gaza💪
August 23,
When the news arrived that the area is being evacuated, we were preparing to create cartoon characters, think about the story of the cartoon, and play a drama game. The children didn't understand it. They did not want to leave and return to their families, and when we decided to leave immediately, the children, Malak, Layan and Fatima, asked to take some artistic tools, colored pencils, feathers, brushes, scissors and paper, in order to complete making the characters in the place where they will go with their families for fear of danger. I hope all the children are well now
August 14,
We are great coworkers and team. We are 12 creative, strong and steadfast artists (Hanin, Hadeel, Manar, Mayada Raeda, Hanan, Sally, Nour, Shorouk, Nour, Soheir, Zeenat) working within the projects of free expression workshops, making animated films using stop motion technique with Theater Days. This is our first meeting in 9 months. We miss our colleagues and friends (Raeda and Hanan) who are still in northern Gaza. The war has changed our futures, but we are still fine and happy with this new meeting
August 7,
A day before the war, we were preparing to shoot the last scene with girls with hearing impairments, a movie that talks about "a girl's right to choose a life partner". We are still continuing our art work and we always need your support and sharing our works and movies
August 3,
When we asked mothers and girls during a cartoon film making workshop: "What will we do if the war ends?!?" everyone was astonished by the question, as if it were an unattainable dream, and they began to answer:
- I want to go clean my house and sleep on my bed
- I see my friends who I haven't seen for 8 months
- I miss my room and the roof of our house
- I miss my clothes and my friends’ gifts
- I miss my master and my lady who stayed in the north
- I miss the garden of our home and the calm
- I am raising my children again
- 24 hours in prayer clothes
- I want to breathe
- I miss snacks and drinking sweet, cold water
- I miss taking a shower
- The Internet remains available 24/7
- I miss the stairs of our house
- For a cup of coffee while I was walking with my husband and son
- I miss my automatic washing machine, how convenient it was
There are cartoon films that need to be made.💪
July 23,
Let us give children artistic opportunities for expression, drawing, photography, coloring, making and watching cartoons، Children have not watched cartoons for 9 months
June 13,
- I am very shy every time I carry a bucket of water and walk like a Haramiya between the tents to take a bath, our lives have become open to all and exposed to all.
- No one knows how I and my children live, every few days we get a coupon, and this is a provision from God, no one comes around after their father was martyred, I am their mother and father.
- I decided to distribute cotton to my brothers and family to close their ears in the tent, because I can't talk or say a word to my fiancé
Scenes from a cartoon movie
May 11,
During the workshop ... No tables to do activity. Hajj Um Hamza told all the ladies participating in the workshop to bring trays from the tents. Trays are not for eating, my dears. Trays, let's follow, identify, draw, color, and subtract.
May 9,
Animated film "A Day in the Tent": The film talks about the daily life of a family from Gaza living in a tent. The film was made with children in a playground in the city of Deir al-Balah, which includes dozens of tents The film was produced in collaboration with Palestinian Performing Arts Network شبكة الفنون الأدائية الفلسطينية , Al-Harah Theater مسرح الحارة , With the help of trainers: Haneen, Nour, Shorook
A pin-post
I don't know whether I will survive or not..! But what I do know is that I will strive to regain my passion and art 💪 War, fear of the dark won't stop me
Please support me and donate✌️
We hope you will consider donating to Haneen’s fundraising campaign.
Samira Badran is a Palestinian visual artist based in Barcelona, Catalonia. Her father, the artist Jamal Badran, played a decisive role in her forming as an artist. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1976 and studied etching and painting at the Accademia Delle Belle Arti in Florence from 1978 to 1982. Her work focuses on her perceptions of the Palestinian reality under occupation. Collective memory, confinement and immobility are some of the concepts she has explored in her recent works. She normally experiments with different techniques, ink drawings, watercolor, acrylic painting, collage, drawing over photography, prints and animation. Her animation Memory of the Land is a reflection of the human condition under the yoke of different forms of violence, collective memory and identity as forms of resilience.
Ahmad Saleh is a Palestinian and Jordanian writer, director and film producer. He holds a master’s degree in digital media from the University of the Arts Bremen and another master’s degree in writing and directing from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He spent most of his school years in Germany, where he also lived for a while. He was not born in Palestine, but he has visited it many times, and each time it has left him with details and stories that he wished he could tell in his own way and, as he saw them with his own eyes. His first film, House, won second place at the German Short Film Award in 2012, and his second film, Ayny, won an Academy Award in 2016. He recently finished his third short film, Night, and is currently developing his first feature film.
Patrizia Roletti is the artistic director of the Nazra Palestine Short Film Festival. She first worked as a production coordinator and then as a production manager on various projects such as the The Passion by Mel Gibson, The Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson, Mr and Mrs Smith by Doug Liman. In 2011, she moved to Paris where she co-founded the Festival Ciné-Palestine (Palestine Cinema Days, 2014), the first Palestinian film festival in the capital, which has become a major event on Palestinian cinema in Paris.
Nazra Palestine Short Film Festival is a traveling cinema project about and from Palestine, born in 2017 from the synergy of various associations, volunteers and citizens passionate about the Middle East, cinema and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Throughout the years, the intentions behind the project remain the same, even clearer and necessary in light of the historical circumstances of recent months. Nazra is Arabic for “gaze”, with an eye as its logo and cinema as its medium. The festival aims to broaden the perspective of those familiar with the Palestinian cause and those approaching it for the first time. Through the lens of cinema, Nazra serves as both a filter and a tool of cultural resistance, telling the stories of Palestinians. Nazra aims to be an archive of Palestinian short films, showcasing their avant-garde spirit and amplifying the voices of Palestinian authors who might otherwise go unheard.
Moderator: Urška Breznik