Tabaq Al Sardine

“The first time I heard of Israel was in Beirut, talking about a dish of sardines. I was six years old, Israel was two.” The dish was the centrepiece on the table of the filmmaker’s aunt. She was raging against the sardines, as they represented the port where her husband worked since they had been forced to leave Palestine. Time had dispelled her anger. On the Golan Heights, the ruins of Quneitra destroyed by the Israeli army, a ruined film theatre, a filmmaker friend from the town (Mohamed Malas) and families shouting each other messages through a megaphone either side of a barbed wire fence: these are images of a past that painfully gnaws those separated by the Israeli-Syrian border. © Films Grain de sable / Omar Amiralay