Dhakira al Khasba

In the archive, condition reports are used to monitor the ongoing changes in film prints, documenting their gradual transformation over time. In this series, filmmaker Juan González shares moments of discovery from his work inspecting prints in the Arsenal collection. In FERTILE MEMORY, Michel Khleifi portrays two Palestinian women: Roumia Farah Hatoum, a widow living in Nazareth, Galilee, and Sahar Khalifeh, a young Palestinian novelist from Ramallah in the West Bank. Though they come from different backgrounds, the two women share a common struggle: the daily effort to survive under conditions that deny them, as women and as citizens, the right to determine their own lives. At one point, Khalifeh remarks that, under such circumstances, she does not even have the possibility of being alone with herself. Through the richness of their daily lives, the film opens onto the story of a country that, after years of occupation, continues to struggle for the space to exist on its own terms. (Juan González Monroy)