PALESTINE WILL BE FREE(?) – More than 10.000 people come together in Amsterdam for a mass demonstration in solidarity with Palestine

PALESTINE WILL BE FREE(?) – More than 10.000 people come together in Amsterdam for a mass demonstration in solidarity with Palestine

This is one of those historical moments where tragedy unfolds in massive scale and bloodshed spills into our feeds, filling up our waking hours and intruding in our nightmares. When my friends and flatmates Saliem and Wael told me about a massive demonstration in Amsterdam in solidarity with Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants (53% of which are kids and teenagers), I grabbed my handycam and went there trying to act and join this movement doing what I can: and so I’ve made this short documentary <Palestine Will Be Free (?)> (watch it for free in YouTube – creative commons license) while worldwide demos took to the streets.

For many years I’ve been filming demonstrations in frenzied streets whenever I’m attuned to the causes and political aims that the protesters embrace and act upon. And my kino-eye is often very interested in seeing + recording what people decide to write in their home-made and often hand-written protest signs.

The notion of unity in diversity – a concept very dear to the heart of marxists such as Paulo Freire – can be seen as a concrete and real-life phenomenon through the exposition of a myriad of such catch-phrases and illustrated shouts: there’s a variety of viewpoints, a diversity of messages, and yet they all seem to converge. They are parcels, however different, of the same struggle, expressions of a multitude that chooses to belong on the same side of the barricade.

It was a cold, windy and rainy Sunday in Amsterdam this 15th of October – but the not-so-welcoming weather couldn’t keep protesters from flooding Dam Square to stand together in solidarity with Palestine. All around me, in a semiotic meltingpot of amazing linguistic difference, I could also read the unity of purpose: we were all worried about an impending genocide that the zionist state of Israel, headed by an extremely corrupt far-right extremist called Netanyahu, was about to unleash against Gaza (with the blessings of the White House and other long-time allies).

Here’s some examples of what people here in the Nederlands were expressing: “globalize the Intifada!”, “stop the genocide!”, “decolonization is not theory”, “ethnic cleansing is not self-defence”, “one Holocaust does not justify another”, “Judaism rejects Zionism”, “your taxes pay for massacre” etc.

We can see quotations outside Academia’s walls and ivory towers also flooding the streets through the resonating words of Malcolm X, Mandela, Gandhi, Guevara, Angela Davis, Fanon, Desmont Tutu etc. I’m only give you example: “if you’re neutral in situations of oppression you’ve chosen the side of the oppressor” (Tutu). But sometimes you can also get in sudden touch with an original thought, or what seems to be something you’ve never read before: like this woman, from this photography above, stating that “land you have to kill for is not yours; land you have to die for is!” That’s quite a statement, filled with tragic pathos, speaking in a tongue that has gone to the extremes, land grabbed with killing vs land defended with self-sacrifice, going to the bloody crux of this still unsolvable mess.

Photos of protest signs give visibility to them across our networks of communication: those who couldn’t be present at the civic gathering can see some of the expressive action that took place in the public plaza; but of course photography is soundless and we need cinema to step in to provide something close to an aesthetic experience of all the uproar, shouting and cheering of such extraordinary moments of multitudes coming together.

This shortfilm – Palestine Will Be Free (?) – was shot and edited pretty quickly, with a sense of urgency, and is released upon the web so that the protest can resonate beyond its evanescent occurence in space and time. It’s my humble manner of collaborating with a collective struggle to put an end to endless bloodshed and finding a political solution to a 75-years-plus never-ending crisis. There’s chanting, call-and-response, rhythm and poetry, all resounding throught the wide open space of the Dam Square, with immense flocks of birds flying above our heads and monumental buildings all around: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! One, two, three, four: occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight: Israel is a terror-State! Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry: Palestine will never die!”

The film will available free on-line unless it gets censored and taken off the Web by our technofeudalists such as Zuckerberg and Musk; it’s title, of course, refers to a common shouted phrase – Palestine Will Be Free! – but I’ve chosen to delete the exclamation mark and add (?) at the title’s end to highlight a sense of worried-mindness and far-from-optimistic prospect about the upcoming butchery that will perhaps result in something far removed from Freedom, our ever-strived-for and ever-so-elusive object-of-desire. Freedom: our vanishing point.