The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Arab Film Festival present an evening with Palestinian director Najwa Najjar. Najjar is renowned for her complex use of pre-1948 archival footage as well as her relentless effort to write the Palestinian experience of displacement and exile as a montage of crushing political events, oral testimonies, and a jarring compilation of micro-historical traces. Najwa's personal documentaries evoke with great force the significance of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) as an everyday interplay of identity, history and memory.-Tarek Elhaik

Nai'm & Wadee'a (Najwa Najjar, Palestine, 1999)

Through a miniature portrait of a Palestinian couple this poignant experimental documentary explores social life in the city of Yaffa, Palestine, before 1948 to create a reflexive essay on the Catastrophe-specifically the effect leaving Yaffa had on the couple, the director's grandparents. (20 mins, Color, Video, From the artist)

Quintessence of Oblivion (Najwa Najjar, Palestine, 2001)

This beautifully rendered filmic journey was originally conceived as the exploration of the social life of Jerusalem through the history of the city's well-known movie palace, the Al Hambra Cinema, from the 1950s until its closure in 1989. Then five months ago the present Intifada began, and everything had to change. In the new reality of today's Jerusalem, Najjar found herself faced with the question of how Palestinians living in Jerusalem in 1948 and 1967 could possibly go to the movies after the wars, after their city was divided. Using oral histories of Jerusalemites living both in the city and in the diaspora, present-day interviews, archival footage of Palestinian everyday life, as well as radio broadcasts interwoven with fascinating clips from the films shown at the Al Hambra over the decades, Najjar creates a rich and powerful Palestinian mosaic of their Jerusalem, past and present. Screened at the New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2001.-Tarek Elhaik (45mins, Color, Video, From the artist)