Review: The Tower

Chris Keulemans

Impossible to capture the reality of everyday life in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. Ever since they were expelled in 1948 by the Israeli armed forces, Palestinian families have built temporary homes in these camps, literally one layer on top of the other. From tents to brick houses to wobbly towers of up to four, five stories high. Four generations living in cramped, angry, suffocating surroundings, still without citizen’s rights but clinging to whatever is left of their dignity. Some of them still dream of returning. Others have resigned to live and die in this permanently temporary limbo.

Mats Grorud and his team have done the impossible. In this full feature, one of these Palestinian families come to life in a marvellous animation of puppets and 2D backdrops. Wardi, an eleven-year-old girl, and her beloved great-grandfather Sidi breath and cry and grumble and dream through their rediscovery of a tragic family history. Their crowded living quarters, the narrow alleys lined with electricity cables and the shaky stairways leading up to flat roofs with a view of the land they will never be able to reach – it’s all there is painstaking detail, every shadow, graffiti, fading photograph on the wall.

Grorud, a smiling blond 43-year-old Norwegian animator, has been familiar with the Palestinian cause all his life. ‘When I was a child, my mother worked in Lebanon during the war as a nurse. When she came home every three months, she would tell me about the camps and show me pictures. Then, in 1989, when I was 12, we went to live in Cairo where she worked at the Palestinian hospital.

We took the opportunity to go to Jerusalem and Gaza during the First Intifada. At the end of the 90s, I went to Lebanon for the first time, then I lived in Beirut for a year in 2001 while working for an NGO in the Bourj el Barajneh camp.’ He stayed on to teach English and animation to the Palestinians in the camp. Based on those experiences, he created the irrestistible Wardi, the little girl with unruly hair who is determined to do well at school, who dances with her mother in small private moments of joy and who sets out to trace the stories of her family, now that her great-grandfather is reaching the end of his life. The Tower is a moving, shaky, heartwarming monument to families like hers – and the hope they carry with them.

Tuesday 16/07
16:00
Feature Film Competition
Kino Jusuf Gërvalla