Wadi Foquin 2021 - Deir Hanna 1981

In her visual diary, a girl who lives in the West Bank talks about her journey to the village of Wadi Foquin in Bethlehem, the villagers and her new friend "Raja", simultaneously with the land day events.

  • Rana Abushkhaidem
    Director
  • Mira Jibreen
    Director
  • Mahasen Nasser-Eldin
    Supervision
  • Salim Abu Jabal
    Supervision
  • Monica Mauer
    Archival footage
  • Piero Tartagni
    Cinematography
  • Francesca Pardini
    Cinematography
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    وادي فوكين ٢٠٢١- دير حنّا ١٩٨١
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 45 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 1, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    Palestine, State of
  • Country of Filming:
    Palestine, State of
  • Shooting Format:
    Film, Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Dar Al-Kalima University
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Cine-Festival Ciné-Palestine (FCP)
    Paris
    France
    June 2, 2023
    World Premiere
    Official selection
Director Biography - Rana Abushkhaidem, Mira Jibreen

Rana Abushkhaidem is a Palestinian director with a passion for visual arts, archives, and anthropology. She holds an MA in Creative Practice from Atlantic Technological University in Galway, Ireland, and a BA in Film Production from Dar Al-Kalima University. Through her practice, Rana continues to explore storytelling at the intersection of film, animation, and archival research.
Rana has directed three short documentaries: Cinema Al Amal (2024), currently being screened at international film festivals; Wadi Foquin 2021–Deir Hanna 1981 (2021), featured in the opening screening of Festival Cine-Palestine Paris in 2023; and El-Halabiyeh (2021), which won the Audience Award at the Davis Feminist Film Festival in 2023.
Beyond filmmaking, Rana is actively involved in community-based projects. She is a founding member of the Palestinian Production Directory and has worked as an audio-visual content creator for the Palestinian Museum (2022–2023). She also contributes to the Oral History Project with the Cultural Symposium Club in Hebron.

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Director Statement

After the ill-fated Oslo Accords in 1993, life, development, and productivity in the West Bank slowed, at times reaching complete stagnation. What occurred in the cities and villages occupied in 1948, such as Nazareth and the villages of Deir Hanna and Sakhnin, is now happening in the towns and villages of the West Bank, such as the village of Wadi Fukin in the Bethlehem Governorate (2021). There, we encountered the same natural and architectural landscapes, and the same attachment to the land and to farming. Travelling between cities via bypass roads is also the same, along with many other similarities that became apparent, rather than the differences and transformations one would normally expect memory to reveal when viewing archival material from the past.
For this reason, when we first watched the archival footage used in the film (footage by Monica Maurer from 1981), we did not feel a significant difference between our visual memory of Palestine in the West Bank and the scenes we were seeing of occupied Palestine filmed in 1981.
Thus, we used this material to create visual memoirs of a girl visiting the village of Wadi Foquin in Bethlehem, where she narrates her journey through voice-over while the audience watches the archival footage of Deir Hanna from 1981.