Palestine Through the Eyes of the New Western Generations in the Film "House in Jerusalem"

Under cover of darkness, a girl with Western features knocks on the door of an elderly Palestinian woman who lives alone in Bethlehem.

The lady invites her to enter, surprised by the arrival of this little foreign girl at night without her prior knowledge.

While the girl asks one of the brides for the cloth she is making by hand, a young woman knocks on the door, claiming that she is a neighbor to the old man, and she brought pies for her, only to discover that she is a member of the Israeli police in civilian clothes.

These elements suddenly storm the place and forcibly load the little girl into a car and drive her towards her father's house in West Jerusalem in the movie "House in Jerusalem" by Palestinian director Moayad Alyan, co-produced by several countries in 2023.

The father tries hard to take care of the girl and make up for her mother's absence, to no avail, so he resorts to a psychiatrist who holds treatment sessions with them and follows the method of injections sometimes and the method of medical drugs at other times.

However, the girl pretends to take the medicine, but she spews it out and hides it under the bed cover

The film's story revolves around Rebecca, a British Jewish girl who moves with her father from England to live in West Jerusalem to start a new life in order to recover from the shock of her mother's death in a road accident.

It is one of the supernatural fictional films in which ghosts and unreasonable things appear to reflect what is going on in the heroine’s psyche in a praiseworthy attempt by the director and author of the film to transfer the vision of new generations of Westerners of the Palestinian cause and Jerusalem to a new type of film away from the traditional historical narrative and the direct account of the suffering of the Palestinians.

In this context, the film draws an intelligent comparison between the suffering of the modern Western child and the suffering of the old Palestinian child during the Nakba, to draw in the viewer's imagination how the suffering of the modern Palestinian child might be.

By focusing on the suffering of loss, pain and trauma in the Western child, it sets a model and an example to communicate a new meaning to the concept of this suffering.

Most of the film's texture seems to be in a complete Western context in terms of form and characters, and about a third of the film's duration is shrouded in mystery, as it takes us on a journey inside the psyche of the child Rebecca, who suffers from auditory and visual hallucinations due to her grief over the loss of her mother.

The father tries hard to take care of the girl and make up for her mother's absence, to no avail. He resorts to a psychiatrist who holds treatment sessions with them and follows the injection method sometimes and the method of medical drugs at other times.

However, the girl pretends that she is taking the medicine, but she spews it out and hides it under the bed cover. Here, the girl relates to the ghost of another girl named Rasha who appears to her from time to time from a well in the garden of the house, and Rasha's ghost tells her that she is waiting for her mother, who was absent because the soldiers entered the house.

This ghost was only a shadow of what happened during the Nakba in 1948.

The visual language in the film is relatively weak and reflects the weakness of production capabilities, and the director compensated for it by making good use of natural and artificial lighting.

As for the main strength of the film, it is the power of treatment and the story, in which I imagine that a psychiatrist has participated in it. The pace of the film seems slow, but it succeeds in attracting the viewer and forcing him to stay in front of the screen in anticipation and curiosity of what the events will lead to.

The texture of the movie "House in Jerusalem" appears, for the most part, as if it is in a complete Western context in terms of form and characters (networking sites)

Jerusalem in the Western conscience

The main scene in the film, or as it is called (Master Scene), is when Rebecca walks alone from East Jerusalem to cross the separation wall at night.

While she was about to cross one of the barriers, a Christian procession entered in front of her, with nuns chanting some church hymns, so she joined the passing group, as if it were a majestic religious procession from the East and West, penetrating the fortresses of isolation between two cultures and two peoples.

Here we see the separation wall at night, devoid of people, standing alone. The street lighting draws some shadows on it. The camera looks into the eyes of the little girl at this wall and the drawings and slogans on it, to discover with her how high and large it is.

The child's eyes are a low angle of photography, or what is called in architecture the ant's eye, which is a perspective that allows a view from below of things and shows how the child sees them as large and huge, perhaps larger than their normal size.

Here, the little girl's eyes open to a different reality that she had not known before, and astonishment appears in her eyes as she looks at the faces of the Palestinians that she is not familiar with.

This visual perspective was also used by the director during Rebecca's tour of East Jerusalem.

Here, the director presented exploratory visual paintings of the city's architectural topography, including the lanes, shops, and entrances of the old architecture, which, although familiar to some, the angle of its depiction with the eyes of the child made us rediscover it again and reflect on its implications.

Personally, I felt that I was seeing the city of Jerusalem for the first time through these fleeting shots, when the director made us assume the character of the little girl walking.

At the end of the film, the threads of the past and present begin to converge on a personal and historical level with the story of Rebecca and the elderly Palestinian woman.

They are united by a touching scene when the father finds no alternative but to bring the elderly Palestinian woman to his house, only to discover that it is her home from which she was displaced during the Nakba. She touches with nostalgia the trees and branches, and the policemen come to take this woman out because her presence in Jerusalem is against the law, which raises the disapproval and astonishment of the father and daughter.

For a while, Rebecca and her father try to understand what happened and is happening, how did this house reach her grandfather's ownership, the nature of these people behind the wall, and how they are governed by laws other than the laws in force with them?

Then Rebecca begins the real journey of recovery, but in England, not in Palestine.

Here is an embodiment of the image of Jerusalem in the English heritage, in which you see God's paradise on his land, and that it is the dreamy model of a utopian city that must be reproduced in England.

It is enough to know that the unofficial national anthem of England in many sports forums is the Jerusalem song by the English poet William Blake, which was written in the early nineteenth century, and one of its verses says:

I will not stop the mental struggle

And my sword will not sleep in my hand

To build Jerusalem

In the attractive green land of England.