top of page

Rosetta (2013) 

Film 04:03 

For a long time, the beach north of Old Jaffa has been unauthorised and has no name. Its border is made out of the destroyed houses of the village of Al-Rasid (Rosetta, in English) that existed until the 1948 war. The village was built outside Yafa’s walls by Egyptian soldiers from the village of Al-Rashid, on the banks of the Nile, who had remained in Yafa following the withdrawal of their leader, Ibrahim Pasha, who had ruled Yafa from 1831 to 1834. The Egyptian village of Al-Rasid was the place in which the Rosetta Stone was discovered.

Until 2011 a small part of a beautiful large house still existed at the edge of the beach. The only other structure that was left was renovated and turned into Biet-Gidi - a museum that celebrates the occupation of the area by the Israeli's Etzel forces in 1948.

The film depicts Maram, a Palestinian teenager from Jaffa, whose grandmother's house stood nearby until it was demolished soon after the 1948 War. Her grandmother is one of the 300,000 Palestinian internal refugees whose land and houses were confiscated in 1948 and who have been banned from returning to the places they had to leave. Through a set of various actions, Maram goes forward and back between Biet Gidi and the last remnants of Al-Rasid neighbourhood. The remnant was destroyed by Tel Aviv municipality a few days after the film was made.

The film was commissioned by Zochrot for the 1st 48mm Film Festival 2013 [ https://zochrot.org/en/article/55076]

bottom of page