Screening and Q&A with director Hind Shofani
Trip Along Exodus is a feature-length documentary exploring the last 70 years of Palestinian politics through the prison of the life of Dr Elia Shoufani, a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, an academic and left intellectual and author of 25 books. He is also the father of the filmmaker. ‘I had very little idea what occupied my mysterious father so intensely while we grew up in Beirut, Damascus and Amman. We had bodyguards and drivers escorting us everywhere and metal bars around the balcony. Hushed whispers of political manoeuvrings were abundant instead of normal social and familial community. An absent father whom we were told was a ‘writer’ should anyone ask. Two decades later, the details of how my father abandoned his family in the occupied Galilee and subsequently a life in academic in Ivy League Universities in the US to join the Palestinian revolution in the 1970s surfaced, and with it, the story of how he created an organised faction to oppose the mainstream policies of settlement that Arafat adopted.
The film recreates Palestinian history using archive, family photos/8mm films, old photos, cartoons, animation, macro photography footage, glitter, worldwide interviews and multi-media formats in a video-art style documentary to produce a personal and political memoir.
Organised with support from
Palestine Solidarity Campaign