Eye on Palestine: Genet à Chatila
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Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
As part of Eye on Palestine, Art Cinema OFFoff presents a screening of Genet à Chatila (1999), a film about the French writer Jean Genet and his relationship to the Palestinian revolution. The late Swiss filmmaker Richard Dindo (1944−2025) follows a young Algerian woman, Mounia, as she retraces the steps of Genet, who visited the Shatila refugee camp just one day after the September 1982 massacre that took place there. An experience so strong that it made Genet take up writing again after many years, first with the text Four Hours in Shatila and four years later with the posthumously published Prisoner of Love.
Genet à Chatila is a personal search for the people, places, and spirit of Genet’s memories, as well as for the collective memory of the Palestinians, removed in time and place from their homeland, both now and in 1982. Genet à Chatila is no reconstruction, but an evocation of lived lives and times, where words travel into the present and are heard and felt anew, in an attempt to fill the gaps between what cannot be spoken.
Richard Dindo
Genet à Chatila
One day after the September 1982 massacre at the refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Jean Genet visits the site. Suffering from throat cancer and having written nothing for years, he begins to write about this disturbing experience. It leads to his final book, Prisoner of Love, in which he reflects on the Palestinian revolution, its defeat and the loss of one’s homeland. In the film, a young French woman of Algerian origin, reading the book, returns to the landscapes of the Palestinian resistance and the refugee camps full of exiles, in search of Genet.
Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
Genet à Chatila © Les Films d’Ici
