By Rylee Pachman
Hareth Yousef is a Palestinian filmmaker who has seen firsthand how his home has changed during his lifetime. That experience has led him to a career making and teaching in the visual arts. Yousef is Duke’s Brock Family Visiting Instructor in Studio Arts, specializing in photography, documentary filmmaking, and moving image practice.
In 2023, Yousef received a human rights summer research grant to document the altered topography of the villages encircling Ramallah, with a focus on his hometown of Kobar.
Yousef holds an M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke and also studied Birzeit University in Palestine. On February 20, he will be a post-screening panelist for “No Other Land,” an Oscar-nominated film. The screening is part of the Rights! Camera! Action! human rights film series sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute. This screening is cosponsored with Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Cinematic Arts, Screen/Society, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Provost's Office, and Student Affairs.
For more information about the screening, check the Duke Events calendar. Tickets are free and registration is required (register here).
What was your experience like documenting your home in Palestine?
I grew up in Palestine and most of my initial work was about the idea of losing access to space that my parents, grandparents, and other relatives had access to. I grew up in a family where everyone talked about their times in Jerusalem. My dad worked there, my grandfather worked there and so did two of my uncles. But, as a person who holds the green ID, I am not allowed to go to Jerusalem as I wish. When I returned home in 2018, I started noticing that I actually am starting to lose access to places that I grew up in, which are the mountains where my grandmother’s herd of sheep grazed. Now I am working on documenting places that I have lost access to because there is more land that is endangered of being stolen by settlers. It’s not a really good experience to be going to places to capture its beauty with the mindset that you're actually losing those spaces, so it's a very emotional experience.
How have your life experiences and work intersected with the film “No Other Land?”
The film talks about a certain place in Palestine which in a way is a similar experience, but the only difference is that in that area, the ethnic cleansing is happening at a faster speed. In my area, it's a bit slower, more subtle, over a period of years. But in that area, they've been doing it at a fast rate – getting rid of communities one after another. They are evicting people. In my area, it’s more about not allowing people to get to their lands, not allowing them to farm, and demolishing buildings that belong to farmers. We're both trying to talk about the idea of losing access to places because of the Israeli occupation.
What has your experience been like working on this film?
I started doing this work to bring attention to the cause. With whatever has been going on, we’ve seen horrible scenes and images and events that we watched live on TV and on social media but unfortunately, nothing much has happened. Sometimes my experience is I sit with myself and tell myself what am I actually doing? Am I actually going to influence and change minds with this kind of work or is this just going to be another project that's going to have minimal effects on people or views? But then I bounce back and I see how the perspective from regular people has influence. Duke is a good example of how things might change because when I started here, I would talk about Palestine but not so many people would actually know where Palestine is. Day after day I started to get people more engaged in the topic. So that keeps me going even though sometimes you get discouraged because of the general atmosphere.
How do you think this film relates to human rights?
In my experience, I have a belief that our image has been distorted over tens of years because of the perceptions of others. So I'm trying to create the image that I actually see that represents us. We've been stripped of our human side and we've been minimized to certain news images that present Palestinians in a certain light. When you hear the word Palestine, the first thing that comes to your mind is certain images from the news, but what I’ve been trying to do is shed a light on the human side for people to be able to connect and see the story that each person goes through. Each person deserves to have a free life. Each person deserves to have access to their own places. Each person deserves to move freely in their countries. Each person deserves to live in their own house that they built on their own land. I’m trying to show people that those are basic human rights that we’re being deprived of just because we belong to a certain group.
What is the main thing you want Duke students to take away from your work and the film, “No Other Land”?
With arts in general and with film, each person goes into the theater with their own experiences and their own stories and then they try to connect with the story that they see in the theater. All I ask people is to think of the story of others and try to put yourself in their shoes. Generally, this kind of activism is meant to pick your mind and heart to see the story of others. It's an invitation to open your mind and heart to the things that you might have a certain view of but that might have been distorted because of different experiences. I typically invite people to come into a space with an open mind and open heart and let those ideas that you’re seeing or images or stories sink in.
Register here for free tickets to the Feb. 20 screening of "No Other Land."