Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)

Yarmouk Camp (Little Palestine), a district of Damascus, accommodated the largest number of Palestinian refugees between 1957 and 2018. When the Syrian civil war broke out, with its armed conflict, the villagers found themselves in the eye of the storm. The Assad regime accuses them of aiding resistance fighters and punishes them for it. Yarmouk has been isolated from the world for three years, and the villagers slowly run out of food, medicine, and even water.

Abdallah Al-Khatib grew up in Yarmouk and was a UN employee until right before the war. A ‘director through circumstances’: Al-Khatib, who was unable to continue his studies at the university because of the war, got a camera from a friend and he started to document the daily life in Yarmouk. The villagers, confronted with violence as well as hunger, show their resilient side in front of the camera. Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege shows an underlying layer of optimism, despite of all the horrible things that are going on. We see how children and adults keep on living as best as they can. Al-Khatib collects their stories with a tenderness that shows immense respect and a deep love. Through voice-over, based on a poetic reflection he wrote during his time in Yarmouk, called 40 Rules of the Siege, he weaves the stories together. It is namely these reflections that raise this film to so much more than just a war documentary. Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege refuses to be a simple journalist report and just asks the question: what is our responsibility as the viewer?