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137 We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees. And we said to our wives: go on giving birth to people like us for hundreds of years so we can complete this journey To the hour of a country, to a metre of the impossible. —Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People” It is a cliché to begin writing about modern Palestine by quoting Mahmoud Darwish,1 one of the country’s most renowned poets. Yet it is also a cliché for any of us to drift from literal to metaphorical allusions to the road, and a cliché like “the Palestinian on the road” perforce grabs us by way of its familiarity, stretching outward both to reach us and to incorporate the specific : “We travel like other people, but . . .” The “but” here is not only the relentless inconstancy of diaspora life but also its ruptured relationship with another Palestinian reality: one of curfew, checkpoint, and forbidden access to territories supposedly, although not in practice, protected by international law. How might these two very different accesses to mobility, to “the road” work dialectically? Neither condition stands still, much as it might long to pause for rest. Neither, thankfully for a necessary sense of identification and solidarity, is uniquely Palestinian. Given these conditions, roads have understandably haunted the film culture of this tiny and potentially easily traversed country, particularly since Kay Dickinson The Palestinian Road (Block) Movie Everyday Geographies of Second Intifada Cinema 02 Iord_Part 2.indd 137 12/17/09 10:11 AM 138 K A Y D I C K I N S O N the inception of the Second Intifada in 2000, while roadblocks, curfews, and checkpoints render cinematic production and dissemination uniquely difficult. A national identity dominated by territorial war and the collective dispossession of Palestine’s seven million plus refugees,2 displaced both internally and within the diaspora, prompts director Rashid Masharawi to claim, “I am trying to make films that look like us: roads, maps. This colours our cultural behaviour . . . I like road movies and I make them without planning to.”3 There are long productions about roads and there are short ones, fictional narratives, documentaries, and many more in between. Palestine’s two most prominent feature films wind around road systems. Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, Palestine,4 2002) maps out a love affair at a checkpoint and peppers its storyline with arguments about driveway expansions and car license plates. Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005) commences on a road to a checkpoint and ends with a potential suicide bomber on a bus. In between, there are all manner of aborted and successful road journeys for the two lead characters (Kais Nashif and Ali Suliman) who mend cars for a living. The epic Israel-Palestine documentary Route 181 (Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, 2003) is structured by a drive along the original and now largely invalidated 1947 border. The dramatic highpoint of Be Quiet (Sameh Zoabi, 2005) unfolds during a roadside toilet stop; Like Twenty Impossibles (Annemarie Jacir, 2003) depicts a film shoot that is dangerously interrupted by a “flying” (temporary ) checkpoint; the quasi-fictional Ford Transit follows the travails and escapades of a minibus (also known as transit or servees) driver; Crossing Qalandia (Sobhi al-Zobaidi, 2002) documents the difficulties of doing just that by car; 25 Kilometers (Nahed Awwad, 2004) chronicles the lengthy, arduous, and hazardous task of trying to reach Bethlehem from Ramallah, once possible along a road whose length the title reveals and which is, since the film’s completion, a journey now entirely blocked by the Wall; the titular subject of Rana’s Wedding (Hany Abu-Assad, 2002) takes place at a checkpoint; Going for a Ride? (Nahed Awwad, 2003) explores car culture in Ramallah via an art installation that positioned vehicles destroyed by Israeli tanks along a “road to nowhere”; A Few Crumbs for the Birds (Nassim Amaouche and Annemarie Jacir, 2005) is set within a gas filling station and a brothel employing Palestinian refugees on the road to the Iraqi border. Hopefully for the Best (Raed al Helou, 2004) and Palestine Blues (Nida Sinnokrot, 2006) are distinguished by lengthy shots of the road captured from onboard vehicles; Trafic [sic] (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2006) satirizes the stagnancy and disruption of the Palestinian situation with a road-based metaphor of crossing signals flashing...

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