A discussion on the historical context of the film will follow the screening, led by Dr. Barry Trachtenberg, Chair of Jewish Studies at WFU and Dr. Nadia Yaqub, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at UNC

In the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, a Palestinian teenager is swept into a protest that changes the course of his family’s life. Reeling from its aftermath, his mother, Hanan, shares the story that led them to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, this epic drama traces the hopes and heartaches of one uprooted family, revealing not only the scars of displacement, but the unbreakable spirit of survival.

A historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide, Barry Trachtenberg is the author of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish (Rutgers, 2022), The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse, 2008). He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, Jacobin, the Forward, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. In 2017, he testified to the US Congress on the topic of antisemitism on college and university campuses. In 2023, he submitted with colleagues expert testimony in support of a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in 2024 testified in the trial Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden seeking an emergency injunction to stop military and diplomatic support for Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Gaza. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School. He holds the Michael H. and Deborah Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University.

Dr. Nadia Yaqub – My research has treated Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. My recent publications include Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press 2017), a volume of essays co-edited with Rula Quawas,  Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), available open access at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/315958}, a monograph about Palestinian cinema of the long 1970s, and Gaza on Screen (Duke University Press, 2023), available open access at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63468), an edited volume about film and media from and about the Gaza Strip.

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