Unruly Daughters to Mother Nation: Palestinian and Israeli First-person Films

Abstract

This artick examines the Zsraeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiogruphical texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it.My mother got a desperate phone call from Abed. His four-year-old son was alone in an East Jerusalem hospital-alone because neither Abed nor his wife had permits to enter Jerusalem. The poor boy was awaiting an emergency operation without his parents. The thought hammered, ricocheting through my brain. I held tight to my sixteenth-month-old baby and cried. As my mother relayed the content of the call and the hours that followed, I could not imagine any parent tom apart from his or her child at a time of need. This cognitive process quickly led to a familiar anger at the sins of the occupation and its violent machinations against civilians.