Solothurn honours Edna Politi, a filmmaker shaped by exile, memory and resistance

Edna Politi was the first Israeli to make a feature documentary about Palestinian refugees ("For the Palestinians", 1974). Later she focused on the music and composers of the 20th century. Matthieu Croizier

Lebanese-born, Geneva-based filmmaker Edna Politi is the first non-Swiss to be chosen as guest of honour of the most important event of the Swiss film scene, highlighting her singular look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Last year was full of good surprises for Edna Politi. Le Quatuor des Possibles (The Quartet of the Possibles), her 1992 documentary about a quartet by the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono was chosen as one of the 1,000 films in UNESCO’s World Heritage list. Her first three films, For the Palestinians, an Israeli Witnesses (1974), Like the Sea and its Waves (1980), and Anou Banou, or the Daughters of Utopia (1983) have been restored and will be shown in a retrospective at Solothurn. 

When asked how she felt about being the first person with an immigrant background to be the guest of honour at the Solothurn Film Days, she said she was surprised – but honoured. “I was taking this homage as a Genevan, for I’ve been living in this city for more than 40 years,” she told Swissinfo a few days before the opening of the festival. “The festival has shown my work since I am a Swiss resident, but the funny thing is that I’m not a Swiss citizen – at least not yet.” 

Edna Politi

Edna Politi was born in the Lebanese city of Sidon in 1948 and grew up in the capital, Beirut. She attended a school of the Alliance Israelite which followed a French curriculum in French and the Lebanese curriculum in Arabic, while also learning Jewish history and Hebrew.  

She moved to Israel at the age of 18 (“to live my life freely away from the traditional family”) and in the early 1970s studied film in Germany. After some years in France, she followed her first husband, a French musicologist, to Geneva, where she made several video-reportages for the francophone Swiss television RTS. After her Middle East trilogy, Politi turned to make films inspired by 20^th century music.

She has Lebanese, Israeli and French nationalities. “I have always considered belonging to so many identities and cultures a privilege, a stroke of good fortune,” she says.

At 78, Politi is still active and in the process of writing a new work – a sort of science-fiction, she says, “or rather a politics-fiction taking place in a distant future and told as though it were a tale from the Arabian Nights, in a fragmented way. In this way I would like to revisit and question my very own Middle East.”

This sounds like a clear rupture with her past filmography, soberly anchored in the realism of her first documentaries – except for its politics. Even Politi’s only fiction feature, Comme la Mer et ses Vagues (Like the Sea and its Waves, 1980), her graduation project at film school, was inspired by her personal experiences among Lebanese exiles of the civil war in Paris. 

A long-lasting present 

Whether documenting the past or imagining the future, Politi’s films are always speaking about the present – and this present tense can be very long and wide. Watching her first film, For the Palestinians, an Israeli Witnesses (1974), there is an odd feeling that her whole narration, from more than half a century ago, could have been written today.

“That’s funny,” she says. “I heard exactly these same words from the editor who was working on the restauration of the film. But I was still a cinema student then. I did this film in my second year at school!”

Palestinian refugees of the 1947-48 war, in a scene of Politi’s first documentary film “For the Palestinians, an Israeli Witnesses”. Edna Politi

For the Palestinians was the first documentary feature made by an Israeli about the plight of Palestinian refugees, from Israel’s War of Independence (known as the Nakba – catastrophe – by Palestinians) to the Six-Day War in which Israel conquered the territories that remain under occupation.

“I feel very sad that this film is still relevant today,” she adds, as the actuality of the film has less to do with her visionary powers than with the fact that the reality of the Palestinian question is still urgent, and what changed has been for worse.

The clarity that leads to limbo 

“I really tried as much as possible to show the different facets of this issue. In fact, the film stresses a historical perspective that I have always stuck to, namely that one must understand [an issue] before judging,” she says. 

Made while she studied film in West Berlin, For the Palestinians was never shown in Israel. It did have a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, watched by Israeli journalists. “One of them was Uri Avnery,” Politi says, referring to the veteran pacifist and one of the loudest critics within the Israeli intelligentsia of the occupation. “He published a long interview with me in his magazine and that’s how people in Israel came to know me and the film.” 

Politi, who used to work as a film editor for Israeli television before going to study in Berlin, didn’t receive a warm welcome on her return to Israel.  

“One quickly made it clear to me that I would no longer have a job in the field of film and television. It wasn’t that they were going to harm me or my ideas, or torture me, but the idea of having two States for the two people was simply inacceptable at this early period, both for Israeli government and for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).” 

Critical attachment 

Is this why she decided to leave Israel for good? “I never left for good”, she replies. “I’m still very attached to that country, its culture and the people. And I spent long periods there, for example when I made Anou Banou.” Discussions about Zionism do not move her. “I’m not worried about being or not being Zionist; the point is that this nation exists, that Zionism has done its work and you have a country with ten million people that you cannot simply efface or say they don’t have the right to exist.” 

Women training at Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz in 1947 or during the 1948 Arab Israeli War. The story of this particular kibbutz is at the center of Politi’s documentary “Anou Banou, or the Daughters of Utopia”. Wikimedia Commons

Politi laments the disappearance of a generation of Israeli artists and thinkers, such as the writers Amos Oz (1939-2018) and A.B. Yehoshua (1936-2022), who used to offer some sort of moral guidance, more in tune, as Politi says, with Jewish ethics.  

Politi concedes that her positions regarding Israel were influenced by growing up in an Arab country, with Arabic as her first language. And even her Jewish side is very distinct from the experience of the Europeans who shaped the Zionist movement.

Her family traces its origins to the most ancient Jewish community of the Diaspora, the Greek-speaking Romaniotes, which somehow mingled, within the Ottoman Empire, with the Sephardic Jews of Iberian origin fleeing Catholic persecution. 

Pioneering women 

Edna Politi was born in the same year as the state of Israel, but her family never considered moving to the new Jewish state next door. One of the reasons her parents decided to move from her native Sidon to Beirut in 1948 was that their house was temporarily confiscated by the Lebanese authorities to accommodate the refugees arriving in droves from Palestine.

“Congress for Israel-Soviet Union Friendship”, artist unknown. Published by the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI), 1954. By the time the Israeli state was founded (1948), the communists and other factions defending a common Arab-Jewish state were already in the margins of the Zionist movement. revolutionarypapers.org

“The Sidon Jewish families who lost their property could recover them later, but my father decided to move to Beirut.” She also recalls that by then almost nobody referred to the refugees as Palestinians. “They were  called simply ‘laji’ (refugees), because there were many other refugees in Lebanon, such as the Armenians, the Kurds and the Hauranis”, she says.

Coming of age in the revolutionary 1960s also steeled her as an unapologetic left-winger, and all of her films and television programmes tackle matters of gender equality, social justice and human rights. In this vein, it is important to highlight what this critic deems as her most important film, even more than For the Palestinians.  

Anou Banou or The Daughters of Utopia, made in 1983, is based on conversations with the pioneer women who left Europe in the 1920s to build the Jewish homeland as a Zionist, socialist, and feminist utopia in the form of the kibbutz movement. Some of these very politicised women became members of parliament, and they all stuck faithfully to their political credo.  

Halfway into the film, Politi mentions the Palestinian question, and the interviewees don’t hesitate to mention some historical mistakes in the way the country evolved. One of them tells how the nation’s “founding father”, David Ben-Gurion, in the 1930s sidelined communists and socialists within the Zionist movement who vied for the union of Jewish and Arab workers as part of the same revolutionary effort against the British mandate, international capitalism, and Arab landowners.

Pnina Feinhaus (standing, the third from the right)) with other members of the Communist Party of Israel in a picture taken in October 1948 in Haifa, Israel. Feinhaus is one of the women interviewed in “Anou Banou” and an active leader of the party until her death. Photo by Kobi Kastan. Private collection of Yoram Gozansky.

This is a story without much traction in the current situation, when not only film festivals, but also literary, artistic, scientific and academic events, mainly in Europe and the United States, but also elsewhere, are subject to great caution when dealing with the war in Gaza, the actions of the Israeli state, and the Palestinian condition.  

In this context, the organisers of the Solothurn Film Festival seem to have opted for a subtle but unambiguous message, honouring an artist whose life history, vision and practice are an embodiment of coexistence. 

Edited by Mark Livingston/ts