Please note: This was screened in Dec 2019
This delightful film uses stop-frame and 2D animation to tell the story of Wardi, a young girl living in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Wardi, an eleven-year-old Palestinian girl, lives with her whole family in the Beirut refugee camp where she was born. Her beloved great-grandfather Sidi was one of the first people to settle in the camp after being chased from his home back in 1948. The day Sidi gives her the key to his old house back in Galilee, she fears he may have lost hope of someday going home. As she searches for Sidi’s lost hope around the camp, she will collect her family’s testimonies, from one generation to the next.
Portraying 70 years of dispossession through the eyes of an exiled 11-year-old girl exiled, Mats Grorud’s film is an excellent addition to a canon of socio-political animations (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis also comes to mind) portraying the plight of Palestinians in a manner that both children and adults can understand.