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LITTLE PALESTINE (DIARY OF A SIEGE)
LITTLE PALESTINE (DIARY OF A SIEGE)

• Director: Abdallah Al-Khatib
• FRANCE, LEBANON / 2021 / DCP / Colour / 89’ / Arabic; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Abdallah Al-Khatib
• Director of Photography: Abdallah Al-Khatib
• Editing: Qutaiba Barhamji
• Music: Arnaud Rebotini
• Producer: Mohammad Ali Atassi, Jean-Laurent Csinidis
• Production Co.: Bidayyat for Audiovisual Arts, Films de Force Majeure
• World Sales: Lightdox 

2021 Visions du Réel Interreligious Award
2021 Valenciennes Documentary Grand Prize, Student Prize
2021 Guanajuato Special Jury Mention, International Feature Documentary
2021 Vancouver Audience Award
2021 Palestine Cinema Days Best Documentary
2021 Innsbruck Best Film–Documentary

The district of Yarmouk in Damascus, Syria, sheltered the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 to 2018. This is a filmed diary of the daily life in Yarmouk, and its besieged inhabitants, who decided to face bombing, displacement, and hunger with rallying, study, music, love and joy. When the Syrian revolution broke out, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad saw Yarmouk as a refuge of rebels and resistance and set up a siege from 2013 on. Gradually deprived of food, medicine and electricity, Yarmouk was cut off from the rest of the world. Hundreds of lives were irredeemably transformed by war and siege. A peacemaker activist, Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in Yarmouk and lived there until his expulsion by DAESH in 2015. Between 2011 and 2015, he documented the daily life in Yarmouk, the footage that became the basis for this film that premiered at Visions du Réel in 2021.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.