At the crossroads: the films of Annemarie Jacir

The films of Annemari Jacir, an American-Palestinian director, are concerned with the questions of identity and nationality. Her films, besides criticizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, portray the issue of intersectional diasporic identity through the protagonist’s nostalgic homebound journey, replicating the director’s own longing to go home.
Her films along with the other films labeled as Palestinian help preserve this stateless nation’s identity. Although the concept of ‘national’ cinemas have increasingly been questioned across contemporary scholarship in the global era, when it comes to Palestinian films, a true transnational cinema, it is still often referred to as ‘Palestinian Cinema’. This goes as much as the Academy Awards recognizing the Palestinian films while the United States does not recognize the state of Palestine. Hani Abu-Assad, one the greatest Palestinian directors, states that what binds Palestinian films together is the shared Palestinian ‘struggle’.
Jacir’s films are uniquely situated at the crossroads. They are both diasporic and transnational while offer and identify a certain ‘Palestinianness’. This paper will focus on the two films The Salt of this Sea (2008) and Wajib (2017) since they both complicate the dichotomy of being both an insider and outsider. This paper will also address that how these films keep the memory of the Palestinian national trauma, the key aspect of their collective identity, alive.