This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Join the Toronto Palestine Film Festival in commemorating the 67th year of al Nakba with a special screening of Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork. This screening will take place May 15th at 7pm at the Centre for Social Innovation Annex (720 Bathurst St).
Director Eyal Sivan in attendance via skype
What is Al Nakba?
Al Nakba, which means “The Catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948 for the creation of the Israeli state.
The trauma and memory of al Nakba is still live as millions of Palestinians living inside and outside of Palestine/Israel wait to return to their ancestral lands, while thousands more continue to be expelled from their land. The Nakba has had a profound effect on the lives, narratives, identities and culture of generations of Palestinians. Every year on May 15th the Nakba is commemorated around the world.
Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork
This film narrates the visual history of the famous citrus fruit originated from Palestine and known worldwide for centuries as “Jaffa oranges”. The history of the orange is the history of this land. Through photography and cinema, poetry, paintings, workers of the citruses’ industry and historians, memory and present mythologies, Palestinians and Israelis cross and combine.
The close reading of the “Jaffa” brand’s representation is a reflection on western orientalist phantasms surrounding the ‘holy land’ and the ‘State of Israel’ and a way to reveal the untold story of what was once a commune industry and symbol to Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
Jaffa’s orange is one of the symbols that helped build the Zionist discourse about Palestine: a “desert we have made bloom”.
Based on photographic and cinematographic documents, some going back as far as to the 19th century, Eyal Sivan’s film shows the orange groves at a time when Arab Jaffa was one of Palestine’s most populated and thriving cities.
From the picking of the fruit to its packaging before exportation, the orange was a source of revenue for thousands of peasants and workmen, not only from Palestine, but from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon too. Jews and Arabs worked together in the orange groves. These images were progressively replaced by socialist realist images, Israeli style, depicting labor and songs, emancipated women in shorts, etc.: it was the spreading of the “Jewish Labor”, the socialist call to action, excluding the Arabs. In 1948, Jaffa was ruined under the bombs and most of its population was gone. Jaffa’s orange then became the symbol of an Arab-free Israel. An international advertising campaign imposed the name “Jaffa”, like a trademark, concealing the city of Jaffa, its more than a hundred-year-old orange groves, and the history of the Jewish Arab cooperation over this legendary fruit..
This is a free event.
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