TASHARUK

Anne Marie Jacir is a filmmaker and poet. She has worked at several universities in Palestine and in the United States. Since 1994, she has written, produced and directed over a dozen films and founded her own production company, Philistine Films, based in Jordan and Palestine.

In 2008, she made and directedSalt of this Sea, her first feature film, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. The film explores the concepts of identity, commitment and militancy, the contradictions and uprooting of diaspora Palestinians, while questioning Palestinian belonging and identity through its diversity and complexity. In her latest film, Wajib, Anne Marie Jacir brings out all the contradictions of what it means to be a Palestinian in Israel and takes us into the problems of minorities. The filmmaker regards and studies Palestinian society with both an inner and outer gaze, in a generous and ridiculous way, and she also does so by criticising the Palestinian authority and establishment’s forms of government and corruption.

Throughout her career, she has written several articles on the revolutionary Palestinian cinema of the 1960s and 1980s. Her film When I Saw You takes place at this time, bringing us into the life of the fedayeen through the naive and surprising gaze of a child.

Anne Marie Jacir is a leading filmmaker on an international scale. In 2019, she was part of the official jury of the Cannes Festival. She is a curator and co-founder of Columbia University’s school of Palestinian studies, Dreams of Nation, and works as a freelance filmmaker and editor. She lives between Bethlehem and Haifa, after being banned from entering Palestine for years.