Tall el-Zataar (1977)
Film screening + discussion, presented with Toronto Palestine Film Festival
Date & Time
May 15, 7-9PM (Doors open 6:30PM)
Location
United Steelworkers Building Hall
25 Cecil St.
Toronto, ON
Accessibility
ASL Provided. Masks are required. This venue is wheelchair accessible and has gender neutral, wheelchair accessible washrooms. For any questions relating to accessibility, please email programming@mayworks.ca
Tall el-Zaatar documents the August 12, 1976 massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees at Tall el-Zaatar, a UN-administered refugee camp in northeast Beirut. Produced after the massacre, but featuring footage shot before and during the siege leading up to it, the film reconstructs the history of the camp and recounts the long months of assault and resistance through the voices of the many survivors.
Tall el-Zaatar was produced in two versions: one in Arabic for the Palestinian Cinema Institution of the PLO in Beirut, and the other dubbed into Italian for TV broadcast. Arabic film prints were damaged and lost following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent plundering of PLO archives. Between 2012 and 2014, filmmaker Monica Maurer and artist Emily Jacir rediscovered the rushes of the film, including the original soundtrack in Arabic, which were kept at the Audiovisual Archive of the Democratic and Labour Movement (AAMOD) in Rome. Maurer and Jacir dedicated themselves to salvaging the rushes, restoring and digitizing them in order to make the film available to the public and safeguard these images as part of Palestinian collective memory.
The film will be followed by recorded remarks from Monica Maurer and a panel discussion connecting issues of labour, land, and liberation.
All Mayworks Festival events are free. Registration required.
The Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) is a volunteer-run, non-profit organization dedicated to bringing Palestinian cinema, music, cuisine and art to GTA audiences. TPFF was conceived in 2008 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Al-Nakba.
Monica Maurer, an activist filmmaker, moved to Beirut in 1977 to work the the PLO’s Palestine Film Institute. Over the course of five years, she made six 16mm documentaries about and with the Palestinian resistance. Today, she is dedicated to the preservation of the film and photographic archives of Palestine and the struggles she filmed, aware that the archive enables a political narrative of the present.