Rahhala: Hayya ala Hayya

Abstract images and written text are the two components of this testimony of domestic violence, physical and psychological, that shaped the narrator’s childhood. It is told by a woman who recalls diffuse memories of a decade of abuse endured by her and her sisters, and their escape from it. The text, which appears on screen sentence by sentence, does not tell the entire story. These are fragments, snippets, shards of a story.

Sometimes the images become distinct for a moment—clouds, the moon, treetops at dusk, the sea—but more often they are abstractions. Filmed over six years and in several countries, the images become a refuge, a place where words and memory coexist—anonymous, yet inescapable.