Documentary Film Project Sheds Light on Native Reservations and Refugee Camps
Sarah Moawad interviews Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny for Muftah on their documentary The Native and the Refugee.
by Sarah Moawad
Malek Rasamny began his talk at this year’s Harvard Arab Weekend by saying, “I’m going to talk about land. I’m going to talk about the way land is governed, I’m going to talk about the history of certain pieces of land, and I’m going to talk about the communities that often live and struggle invisibly on those lands.”
Rasamny is a Lebanese-American filmmaker and researcher whose current multimedia project is entitled The Native and the Refugee. The project is a portrait and in-depth exploration of overlooked spaces, specifically the Palestinian refugee camp and the Native American reservation, which have been fraught with tremendous historical and political memory and victim to decades and even centuries of theft, displacement, and state violence.
The idea for the project came when Rasamny met Matt Peterson, a fellow filmmaker and now the project’s co-director/producer, when they were both members of the Red Channels film collective in New York City; the collective is a political media project that organizes screenings and discussions around documentary films. In 2014, Peterson completed a film about the Tunisian insurrection, Scenes from a Revolt Sustained, his first project related to the Middle East. Since Rasamny had lived and worked in Beirut, the idea of collaborating on a film about Lebanon seemed like a good fit.
As they discussed their project, Rasamny and Peterson began to draw parallels between the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and native reservations in the United States. They were fascinated by the similar histories of the two populations, but even more so by the physical spaces that they inhabited - spaces that are rarely, if ever, visited by outsiders. These spaces are characterized and shaped by histories of physical, structural, and environmental violence.
