The first few minutes of Salt of this Sea show archival footage of Palestinians being expelled from the port of Jaffa in 1948: violent explosions, demolition of houses by Israeli tanks, families escaping on overcrowded boats towards life in exile. From the black and white historical images of the Nakba, Annemarie Jacir’s camera displaces our gaze to the present, into the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. In Arabic Nakba is the word for catastrophe, referring to the 1947-1949 Israel-Palestine conflict that followed the withdrawal of the British from Palestine, and the United Nations’ partition plan of a Jewish and Arab state.

Jacir’s first feature-length film is a fictional narrative of voices that claim the right to return home. It is also a feminist story told through the lens of the protagonist, Soraya, a Brooklyn-born young woman of Palestinian descent who is visiting the land of her parents and grandparents for the first time. At Ben-Gurion airport she is subjected to intimidating interrogation and body-search by Israeli border authorities who question her family origins and the purpose of the trip.

Arriving to the West Bank city of Ramallah, Soraya discovers a place that is extraordinarily familiar. Determined to settle in Palestine, she wants to get back the money of her grandfather whose savings were frozen when he was exiled in 1948. At the British Palestine Bank, she is confronted with the impossibility of reclaiming a confiscated account. Wandering through the city she meets Emad, who works as a waiter at a local restaurant. A strong connection develops between the two. While on a long walk together, across landscapes and vistas with the sea in the distant horizon, Soraya melancholically recalls her grandfather; his stories about the Al Madfa café, the Hamra cinema, the library, the joy of swimming in the sea, and Jaffa oranges. It is as if these memories are hers and she retells them as part of her own lived experience. What does it mean to call ‘home’ a place that she had never visited?

Salt of this Sea is also a road movie. Emad’s filmmaker friend, Marwan, also dreams of living abroad. Weaving fiction, reality and fantasy, the three characters (Soraya, Emad and his friend Marwan) begin a journey that challenges the rules imposed by borders, checkpoints, tightening control and police intimidation. Knowing that their trip will inevitably come to an end due to the restriction imposed by Israel on the freedom of movement of Palestinians, they drive to Jaffa in search of Soraya’s family home, and with the plan to rob a bank to get back her grandfather’s savings. The camera captures how deeply trauma inhabits a body, the ways in which it triggers physical responses and how collective trauma is transmitted across generations. Soraya is in anger and pain, faced with her loss which is also that of all Palestinians. She cannot accept the fact that her home is now the property of an Israeli woman who invites them to stay. Back on the road, Soraya and Emad dream of building a home among the ruins of Al-Dawayma, a village scarred by the 1948 massacre. Past and present histories intersect, making it unbearable to passively accept the violence of the current situation – the Nakba has not come to an end.

In the final shot of the film, at the airport’s departure gate, the slow and repetitive movement of the sliding doors recall a sentence often seen in airports: “no return beyond this point.” Yet, here, ‘no return’ carries the oppressive weight of dispossession. Writing about Jacir’s Salt of This Sea, film curator Rasha Salti asks: “What if we went back home on our own terms? Home where it was supposed to be, not the new homes negotiated in sinister deals between heads of states that have never felt the humiliation of homelessness.” Jacir’s film reclaims the right to imagine fearlessly, she argues.

Having studied film at Columbia University, New York, and as a co-founder of Dreams of a Nation Palestinian cinema project, Jacir is actively committed to the support of Palestinian filmmaking and the struggles of national self-determination. Many voices have questioned the ethics of creating a Jewish state which forced vast numbers of Palestinians to leave their homes. However, return is a pre-condition for stability – something that the recent explosions of violence seem to threaten. Professor of Journalism and Political Science Peter Beinart points out that “Jewish leaders keep insisting that, to achieve peace, Palestinians must forget the Nakba. But it is more accurate to say that peace will come when Jews remember. The better we remember why Palestinians left, the better we will understand why they deserve the chance to return.”

Annemarie Jacir’s cinema works against the erasure of history to reveal the fracturing effects of war, occupation and exile in the lives of those who experience it. In Salt of This Sea’s closing credits the following sentence should be read: In remembrance of the Nakba and in particular the Dawayima massacre. As writer Jean Fisher once remarked, “An occupier can seize a territory, but he cannot occupy a poem or an artwork; he can only seek to silence it.”