Abdallah Al-Khatib’s searing documentary was completed two years ago; its arrival now has an awful new significance. The film conveys the day-by-day, moment-by-moment experience of Palestinians living in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, known as “Little Palestine” (in fact, Al-Khatib’s birthplace), while it was under siege by the Assad government from 2013 to 2015. This resulted in 181 people dying of hunger and ended when Islamic State took control of the camp. The terror group were themselves driven out by Russian and Syrian forces in 2018, resulting in most of the camp’s destruction.
The slow death from hunger is horrifying. People eat cactus, and then essentially weeds. Al-Khatib’s camera often poignantly lingers on the brave and even cheerful faces of children, but one of the film’s most disturbing moments comes when a little girl is shown placidly foraging in the rough ground among the weeds for the edible herb verbena. Like many of the people the film-maker speaks to, she is in a traumatised but eerily calm state – you can imagine her as an adult or an old woman – as body and mind try to adapt to lack of food. Nor does she appear to be scared, as the interviewer is, by the nearby explosions.
A piece of graffiti reads: “I am from a country where windows open on to an absence of food.” An old man asks the film-maker if he has a sugared almond. A rare food-aid agency pours soup into people’s carrier bags, these being the only receptacles left. A man howls in the street: “We don’t want Palestine, just get us out of Syria – is there anything worse than this hunger?” It is a record of the past, but an almost unbearable warning of agony yet to come.
• Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege is available from 27 October on True Story.
