Interview with Palestinian Director Annie Sakkab
Palestinian director Annie Sakkab began her journey to create The Poem We Sang four years ago. She attended a Toronto Palestinian Film Festival (TPFF) workshop, which pushed her to find ways to tell her story using film. Sakkab had been unable to attend her uncle’s funeral a decade ago, the guilt from this act providing the kindling for the fire which became The Poem We Sang. This film served as an homage to her uncle who had taught her the song Come Back from Oblivion.
Sakkab’s The Poem We Sang is a 20-minute-long black-and-white experimental documentary. The film features audio recordings of Sakkab’s uncle describing the family’s 1948 displacement and attempt to return in 1967 only to find a settler family living in their home. The film parallels her family’s sadness and historic loss with Sakkab’s own grief over the ongoing loss of family and of land. The film also features a poem taught to Sakkab’s father and uncle by Palestinian poet Khalil Al-Sakakini, which is sung by both Uncle Elias and Sakkab in the film. The story is an ode to all that has been lost to genocide and time.
Her main target audience is her family. Her goal is to revive her family’s songs, and pass them from parents to children. The song is meant to be a gift to all Palestinians. She feels that her message will be understood by all Palestinians without any explanation. She engaged in this process as part of her healing process, to address the guilt she feels over not always being able to show up for her community in the way that she wants to.
Sakkab is a born artist, she has been creating since she was 2 years old. She has studied many artistic mediums, ranging from painting to design, animation, and music. Her animations especially have allowed her to create a world in which she has always desired to live. Sakkab has always wanted to walk from Jordan to Palestine, but she has never been able to because taking the bus is the only way that one is allowed to cross. She always wanted to experience the river, the air, and the sea and animation helped her to actualise that world.
Film and art are ways in which Sakkab has been able to actualise Palestinian futurity. As a member of the diaspora, she feels the pain of destruction taking place in Palestine. She sees the destruction and annihilation taking place and she feels helpless. She feels that filmmakers utilise their medium as a coping mechanism in order to make the trauma more bearable.
In order to complete this story, she conducted research in the Bethlehem archives for 2-3 months. It was very difficult to research Palestinian history utilising the archive because many archives were stolen, difficult to find, or no longer belonging to Palestine. Many of the articles were found in the United States from the 60s to the 80s. The curation of archives by Palestinians and from the perspective of Palestinians is lacking in a major capacity. Sakkab did not want to proliferate the image of Palestinians as destitute people or refugees. She instead set out to create something that would make Palestinians feel dignified, and aid in the reclamation of a land-tied identity which is continuously under attack.
Sakkab tells her story through the utilisation of archival images of Palestinians forced to flee into the Jordan River in the 1960s as well as contemporary images of her niece who resembled her in her youth. She uses visual symbolism to represent the displacement of her family using the themes of love, loss, and identity to illustrate her story. She strives to capture the intense feelings that 1948 and 1967 elicit in the diaspora, even if they were not physically alive to experience said atrocities.
In terms of the production of the film in general, it was a multi-modal, multi-person endeavour. Sakkab used a composer in order to revive the song. A calligrapher aided in the visualisation of the poem within the film. She also worked with an animator and the National Film Board of Canada during the post-production period. The entire process was free-flowing and organic.
Growing up in Jordan, there was no internet and not many ways to listen to “music” in the Western context of the term. The only music came from the TV utilising Egyptian icons. This changed in England where music was frequently disseminated via TV and radio.
Poetry was much more common around the house in Jordan. Sakkab always enjoyed reading and writing poetry. This love of poetry inspired her to utilise audio within the film that was more like the narration of a story. Her uncle and father were taught by the same poet and her uncle used to give poetry to her and her brother to memorise. Poetry was transmitted orally and needed to be memorised and recited. The themes were often of love, homeland, and life. When she was growing up, pre-Islamic poetry in Arabic was still studied in schools.
In the previous Arabic curriculum that Sakkab grew up with, poetry was very important. Today, pre-Islamic poetry is no longer a part of the curriculum and Palestinian issues, and its history is quickly disappearing from schools.
The poem is very important because the poet who wrote it, Khalil Al-Sakakini was a revolutionary who constructed the curriculum in the 40s and 50s. He wrote the poem in the 1920s about early acts of Zionism and his fear for the future of his homeland. This was an apocalyptic oeuvre. The poem talks about inheriting land from the ancestors, protecting one’s land with their souls, and the love for homeland and unity as a nation. In the end, the British Mandate expelled him to Egypt, and he lost his wife and son, dying of a broken heart. He was the owner of the biggest library in Palestine, which is now destroyed.
As the TPFF loomed over Sakkab, it was hard for her to fully celebrate her identity due to the ongoing genocide. “Sad does not even describe” how she was feeling leading up to the festival. Sakkab does not feel the same way that she did two to three years ago when she first conceived of this story.
