Femininity and the Challenge of Representation: Some Thoughts about Minor Israeli and Palestinian Films

Abstract

In a joint interview, shortly after the release of In Between (2016), writer-director Maysaloun Hamoud and lead actress Mouna Hawa proclaimed that the primary aim of the film was to render visible the otherwise invisible lives of young Palestinian women living in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa—an unclassifiable group that forms a minority within a minority within a minority. By what means can a minority relegated to an invisible existence be represented and what is the ethical import of films which grapple with the absence of a feminine space and the impossibility of its representation? These challenges take center stage in several works of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian women filmmakers. While the historical (and present) circumstances and contexts underlying the production of their work differ, the directorial sensibilities which populate the aesthetic fabric of such films point to the emergence of collective assemblages of enunciation that transgress essentialist categorizations.