A Culture on Call

posted on: Mar 4, 2026

By Badea Warwar/Arab America Contributing Writer

In 1981, Michel Khleifi’s Palestinian documentary film Fertile Memory marked by the emergence of what may be considered an eroding cinematic era of explorations and discovery, articulating—in an eloquence of great simplicity—the depth projected concerning the contemporary plight of Palestinian women. Overarching historical references typically associated with documentaries form of genre, bestow prevalence of scenic characterizations, often overlooking a withering selection of voices in relation to their signature —pose an ongoing concern; nevertheless, one deeply out of lag with the 1948 predicament, wavering catastrophe of the 1948 Nakba.

Ma’loul celebrates Its Destruction, another short documentary by the same acclaimed director, can be best described as a veiled outlook offering compelling sight/site re-addressing, all in all, typical questions of inescapable destruction of great universal magnitude for the greater well. Once a year, the former residents of the destroyed village Ma’loul, are permitted to return to the site.  No past structures remain viable except a church and a mosque. More recently, the church alone, in complete solitude, is considered functionally operational for church services and ceremonies.  Here, a more subdued —perhaps even celebratory future horizon beyond destruction prevails over the destruction, thought of not of a legitimate a past but as an underlying continuous condition of denuding, that takes us well into the future.

A Personal Experience

I was eleven in the documentary Fertile memory, sitting on the doorsteps of my maternal grandparent home. overlooking what they call in Arabic “El wadi” a sunken pathway dividing the two parts of a residential t street that is a strictly pedestrian walkway. I was, with all discretion and honesty, a fleeting moment in the life span of the documentary. We can begin to discuss, from destruction, origin here as the origin of a photograph, not of photographic memory, as this impressed moment of stillness in time but of course this thought of death as stillness in an ongoing movement, initiated by the violent doubts of the camera’s focused precision, engulfs another question of death, not for this documentary. 

As spectators, we immerse ourselves in the big screen, mesmerized by the grand narratives – the overreaching issues of 1948 and their relentless grip on the broader scheme of things- allowing for a mediated comprehension of our misallocations, our predicament in relation to what is, in plain view, unquestionably “our spectacle”. We are asked to embrace what matters, whether it appears on the big bulletin board ahead, as some would have it, the big screen or simply within our imaginary cortex: a differential macrocosm for the same microcosm of the smallest, sometimes even one-dimensional, lives.

The theme of our presence outside this marvelous documentary, I would argue, is a question of the wear and tear of information -the redundancy, the reluctant abundance in conveying partial recoveries.  We rejoice in the rebounds of these narratives, saved by platforms’ condemnation of past destruction, not besieged by any documentary narrative totally or absolutely. Romiah, one of the two main characters, does not actually know the whereabouts of the land she is struggling to keep; by the same token, Sahar, the second main character, younger in generation and disposition, does not know Romiah. By that I mean that their duality offers neither a conflictual mediating point nor a referential premise for Sahar’s ongoing work and interest. Both are nonetheless preceded by a mutual external interest. Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction.

The rudimentary, from the perspective of the fleeting moment, depicts a conspicuous us weary of freedom, longing for singularity and independence. Moreover, in repetition it is never the same. We are encouraged not to forget. I’m not sure what remembering means taking into consideration the swiftness of this emerging context saved by the impulse to be. So, for example, when Naifeh (Romiah’s daughter) decides to remarry evading her mother’s destiny she bypasses no bars. Neither Sahar nor Romiah consolidate their truth out of her depreciation.  The ongoing discussion about her truthful plea becomes a question of (their)forgetfulness nothing more allowing for miscellaneous identification and supremacy. Supremacy in forgetfulness then becomes the matter of forgetting a turning point, the precise departure from the ongoing movement to something else, something radically of rummage, in scope.

Questions Arise

How do we keep this arbitrary distinction alive? Within reach? out there for real consummation, all in all, out of the danger presupposed by real consumption? To What edge points, boundary points these stories of misdeeds and triumph in politically emerging realities on the ground, drift us? The older lady, the younger lady, and the fleeting moments? Resistance by default always seemed to me to be the latter.

Again, we are ushered into a new era, radically different, entirely the same but warrants the making of another film by the same director on advanced recalling: the precision of Fertile Memory concerning dispossession.  What is then “a culture on call” as I would like to name this advanced recalling by mere intervention? Do we coincide ourselves to this fallout idea of a culture of intervention?  By what mechanism is it plausible? By what trembles down, that is shocks to the core our knowledge? Toned down by context and locality, “a culture on call” supersedes its intentions. Still, the question what edifice rummage there exists for recalling a “culture on call”?  The runoff, or the runabout on our behalf on the big screen, at every guiding bulletin board? What makes us, “us” is precisely what we do, or cannot do, veraciously know, see it as plausible, in shorts, facts that we dismiss to the maximum but alternatively writes with unprecedented accuracy “us” hinting at the future broader bulletin limits, insinuating what ought to be us? A culture of a global affair? Might be a better name, but for worst recalling. It is the worse apprehension that we try to dismiss. Heavy, hefty discussions of implementation of change at the political scale are, as of now, adjourned. The truth in a fleeting moment, we have witnessed the first farewell to the fertile memory of a crescent by recalling the plain historical truth. This alleged “us,” quite randomly pulled off the sorcerer’s hat conveys better the swift nature of an emerging exigency fulfilling the role of a cultural calling from the embedded difference of a prescribed or conjured up function of” a shifting culture.

I fear I have criticized more than I have summarized myself on piecing Khleifis breathtaking documentaries from my own puzzled realities. Truth appears here in ruins, in rummage, in the fleeting moment. I have been swayed, perhaps persuaded more by the latter notion of the fleeting moment, understood as an incorporation and cooperation with the unconscious truth. In this, I may have succeeded in “vivifying” myself rather than vindicating the path ahead. I look the future out of this beautiful yet dreadful glossary as it happens, through willing intervention and alliances, or through the unwilling throw of the dice. This, I think, is the pretext of time unfolding ‘s thematic, in retrospect, of stillness in a fleeting moment.

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