Emily Jacir

24 marzo 2020 (dalla mia finestra)

Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir

On January 30th the first coronavirus cases appeared in Rome, and Italy suspended all flights from China. On that day I wrote my first message to my family regarding coronavirus, worried. I looked for face masks, but there were none to be found anywhere. On February 4th while in Lausanne for work, I managed to find masks near the train station and bought what I thought would be enough at the time—ten masks—and wore one for the first time on the train back to Milano. On February 27th the cases rose to 650 and I was unable to return to Bethlehem and got stranded in Rome. On February 29th, cases rose to 1128 with 29 people dead. By March 7th, Italy was reporting more deaths from the virus than any other country in the world. By March 19th the death toll in Italy surpassed China’s, and on March 24th —when I filmed this—the daily death toll stood at 743.

letter to a friend

Emily Jacir

A close friend is asked to start an investigation before an inevitable act occurs. Interlacing images, textures, movements, traces, and sounds from over a century, this film recounts in minute detail a home and street in Bethlehem.

تلّ الزعتر (١٩٧٧)، ٢٠١٤

Emily Jacir, Pino Adriano

Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali, Pino Adriano and Jean Chamoun, Tel al Zaatar was the only Palestinian and Italian co-production between the Palestinian Cinema Institution and Unitelfilm. The film’s subject is the August 12, 1976 massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese at Tel al Zaatar, a UN-administered refugee camp in northeast Beirut. Tel al Zaatar reconstructs the history of the camp, its destruction and its resistance through the voices of the men, women and children who survived the massacre. In January 2013, Monica Maurer and Emily Jacir dedicated themselves to salvaging the rushes, restoring and digitizing them, in order to make them available to the public and to safeguard them as part of the Palestinian collective memory. Jacir has edited a work from her selection of the collection and created a soundscape to go with it from the original sound.