Towards a decentered history of Palestinian revolutionary cinema? Case study of the film “Tall El Zaatar” in the audiovisual archives of the Italian Communist Party

Abstract

The film Tall El Zaatar (1977, Abu Ali, Pino, Chamoun, Palestine/Italy), a co-production between the Palestinian Cinema Institute and the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) audiovisual company, has been considered lost for three decades and finally rediscovered in 2011. Beyond the dramatic stories surrounding this film, Tall El Zaatar reveals the importance of considering the transnational dimension of Palestinian militant cinema. In this article about Tall El Zaatar, I will approach the history of the Palestinian revolutionary cinema through the traces left within the archives of an institution with which the Palestinian filmmakers collaborated. On the basis of a set of interviews and documents consulted in the Audiovisual Archives of the Labour and Democratic Movement (AAMOD) in Rome, I will show what the historian can learn from the archival fragments resulting from the exchanges of Palestinian filmmakers with European institutions in general and Italian in particular.