Artist and film-maker Sarah Beddington makes her feature documentary debut with this record of her friendship with Fadia Loubani, a Palestinian woman in Bourj el-Barajneh in Beirut, one of the 58 UN refugee camps. Loubani’s story is fraught with drama and sadness: when she was a much younger woman – and a widow – her extended family had the chance to get refugee status and EU citizenship in Denmark, but bureaucratic qualifications meant her children would only be eligible if she sent them on alone without her. She chose instead to keep them with her, closer to that yearned-for Palestinian homeland which is just a few miles away but behind grim barriers.
Loubani’s friendship with Beddington is complicated by history (someone on camera here is annoyed to hear that she is British, on account of the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration) but she tells Beddington about her family’s home village of Sa’Sa’, right on the Lebanese border, and the family legend of a mulberry tree near their house. It becomes Beddington’s mission to locate this tree on her behalf. The story of Fadia’s tree (perhaps inspired by Eran Riklis’s 2008 film Lemon Tree) is interleaved with thoughts on birds: the Palestinian ornithologist Sami Backleh is interviewed and the film ponders the freedom of birds to go where they like, to ignore the walls and barriers below, and indeed to alight in whatever trees they want.
There is a great sadness and a great frustration in this film, despite the plaintive happiness with which Loubani greets hopeful news of her tree. It’s a film that sets anger and to some extent politics to one side in favour of a sombre, supportive, emotional portrait.
• Fadia’s Tree is released on 5 August in cinemas.
