Event

Trenton IFF A World Not Ours

A World Not Ours

Lebanon, 2012, 93 min. In English and Arabic with English subtitles.

Before his family settled in Denmark, filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, in Lebanon. Hastily built in 1948 and today housing 70,000 refugees in one square kilometer, Ain el-Helweh is an unlikely source of nostalgia and yearning, but for Fleifel it represents the closest thing to a home, a precious concept given his family's history and eventual settlement in Europe. Through the years Fleifel has returned regularly to visit friends and family, always with camera in tow, and in A WORLD NOT OURS he has shaped his extensive video diaries into an affectionate, witty, yet ultimately shattering portrait of this community. Gradually focusing on the experiences of Fleifel's friend Abu Eyad, whose natural intelligence makes him an especially articulate and sensitive witness to the tragically circumscribed lives of Ain el-Helweh's residents, A WORLD NOT OURS conveys the Palestinian experience with an insight that very few films have equaled.