Salt of this Sea - Milh had­ha al-bahr

28-year-old Soraya travels from Brooklyn, where she grew up, to her ancestral homeland, Palestine, for the first time. Here she tries to withdraw her grandparents' frozen money from their account in Jaffa and unexpectedly sets off on a journey through the landscapes with Emad, who was born here. Salt of this Sea is a road movie that describes the search for lost roots and for what is called home.
The filmmaker Annemarie Jacir has already caused a stir with her short films. In her first feature film, Salt of this Sea, she invites us on a crazy journey through a region that would actually be closed to her characters because freedom is a foreign word in this area. Her road movie takes us through unknown regions in Palestine on the one hand and lets us immerse ourselves in the history of Jacir's homeland on the other. But don't worry: the film is anything but a boring history lesson; the filmmaker is interested in the inner workings of history. Jacir lets us share in the experience: What does it mean when an entire people's homeland is taken away from them and the house of their ancestors, from which they were violently expelled 60 years ago, is now inhabited by others? This is anything but a phenomenon of the Middle East; it is simply particularly intense there. Annemarie Jacir not only tells the story of a young woman who visits the region her grandparents had to leave behind for the first time, she lets us feel what numbers and facts can never describe. Her film is atmospherically dense, touching without being polemical. On the contrary: she portrays the Israeli woman who embodies her own generation in Jaffa as very open and also a child of a history full of injustice. The film is a moving journey into the heart of migration with feverish and quiet moments. What has accompanied us for decades via superficial headlines is once again grasped here from a human perspective because it is viewed from within. Where the world has long been at a loss for words, Annemare Jacir has found images. And it has written its own story, which is played by Suheir Hammad, a wonderfully present actress, a woman who is actually a poet and who embodies the desperation of a people. Ultimately, the film is composed of many visible and hidden elements without emphasising them: it is enough that they are there and together make it possible to feel what migration means.
Director: Annemarie Jacir
Film genre: Drama Romance
Admission age / Recommended age:
Country of production: Palestine / Belgium / France / Spain / Switzerland (2008)
Duration: 109'
Cast: Suheir Hammad, Saleh Bakri, Riyad Ideis