News from Home / News from House

“Recently, the government wall project has included a section that separates two West Bank villages, Batir and Walaja, from their cultivable land. The wall passes between the houses and the land, creating a vast scar across the landscape, blocking access to the villages and destroying the whole system of irrigation used for over hundreds of years, if not longer… The stonecutter in my 1980 film House comes from Walaja. I decided to return to West Jerusalem, to the house that was the subject of my film 25 years ago, and again in 1988’s A House in Jerusalem. The stonecutter who is now 70; Dr Dajani, the house’s original owner, now living in East Jerusalem. His cousin Rabija in Amman; Claire Cesari, the actual owner; Steve Levy, the contractor constructing the new building next door; Michel Kichka, the neighbour… News from home. Echoes from the two previous chapters. The disintegration of the house and its residents. Scattering to the four winds in tiny fragments that collect in diasporas in Canada, in Jordan, in Gaza… For a filmmaker, the one who travels to such places, reality becomes a juxtaposition of these fragments of contemporary and archaic memories.” (Amos Gitai)