GENRE: Documentary (feature)
TYPE: FILM | IN-PERSON
Purportedly the first documentary feature film made in Gaza, Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family highlights the historical precedents of war, dispossession and military control that influence a family’s daily life in the Jabalia refugee camp. Intimate scenes – a child is born, a grandmother dies – are inter-cut with visits to the architects of the Israeli military occupation.
Gaza Ghetto follows the El-Adel family: Itidhal and Mustafa and their many children, including Ra’ida Abdullah, Samar, Shuroug, Riham and Ayed. We see the family’s humdrum daily routines: waking up grumpy, getting dressed for school, brushing their hair, and attending morning prayer at the UNRWA Jabalia Girls’ Preparatory School. The film provides historical context through archival footage from 1948 when the original Israeli invasion of Palestine displaced some 150,000 people, and 1967, when the Six-Day War resulted in the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the displacement of a further 300,000 people. We see scenes of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, where Mustafa works as a healthcare provider alongside an inadequate international response—the United Nations and Quaker volunteers distributing meager rations—and the grueling daily grind endured by the working-age men and women of the camp, who leave the camp before dawn each day and spend several hours commuting to Tel Aviv or Jaffa to then spend hours, and sometimes entire fruitless days, soliciting jobs in an informal day-labor market.
Discussion to follow with mental health / health care workers/supporters on the theme of workplace mental health to connect to the 2024 World Mental Health Day theme. Participants include Mohamed Abdelhack, Sarah Abusarar, Rayan Anton and Dr. Yipeng Ge.
Mohamed Abdelhack is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CAMH studying neural dynamics of psychiatric disorders using machine learning. He is also the founder of Arabs in Neuroscience, a grassroots organization that aims to improve education in Arab countries and create a network for Arabic-speaking neuroscientists. He is a recipient of Canada Brain Starts Award and The Neuro – Irv & Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prize. He originates from Alexandria, Egypt and has international experience working in Japan, the United States, and South Africa.
Rayan Anton MSW, RSW is a Palestinian Social Worker and Psychotherapist. He is a first-generation immigrant from occupied Palestine, and moved here at a young age with his family in hopes of finding a life free of danger and oppression. He works largely with the Arab community and also the 2SLGBTQ community here in Toronto. He is the co-founder of Meem Toronto – a social group for queer and trans people from the Arabic-speaking region.
Dr. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based on the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. In his clinical practice, he works in family medicine practice and refugee health at a community health centre. He has worked on and studied the structural and colonial determinants of health in both the settler colonial contexts of so-called Canada and occupied Palestine. Having witnessed the atrocities in Gaza firsthand as a humanitarian medical volunteer, Dr. Ge leverages his direct experiences to raise awareness and educate the Canadian public about global injustices.