"The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes... I was twelve years old… I've been here for 60 years." A beautiful, poignant documentary, Still Life examines the effect a collection of personal photos showing life in Palestine before the 1948 displacement have on an elderly Palestinian fisherman living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of place and memory in preserving a people's history are crucial to Diana Allan's illuminating documentary. In, Said Ismael Otruk, a Palestinian man born in Acre in the 1930s, recalls his childhood and the halcyon days of his youth. His memories, not always accurate, so he relies on the photographs he managed to take with him. They are images of young boys, of the port, of fishing boats and the sea. On one, he reads a note he wrote many years ago: "Acre and Said in the Golden Age."

Still Life

Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history.  An anthropologist, author (her most recent book is "Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile) and filmmaker, Diana Allan documents the experiences of the Ibrahim family, who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The film looks at their relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they've persevered in this ‘temporary' home.  Produced at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Terrace of the Sea is a haunting work, a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and - between seeing and being seen.