LYD The story of a city thatIN once connected EXILE Palestine to the world. Contents Log Line Synopsis Treatment Director Statements Still Frames Budget Production Stage Financial Plan Production Company Portfolio Director and Producer Bio Filmographies. Director and Producer Portraits Links to Project and Select Previous Work Technical Details and Crew Title: Lyd In Exile Genre: Creative Documentary Runtime: 75 minutes DCP Color HD 1920 x 1080 and 4k Country: US and Palestine Producers: Rami Younis and Fivel Rothberg Executive Producer: Roger Waters Associate Producers: Reda Sabassi and Nancy Kallow Directors: Sarah Friedland and Rami Younis Contact http://www.lydinexile.com/ Perinspire LLC By Sarah Friedland, Rami Younis, and Fivel Rothberg Contact : [email protected], Sarah Friedland: +1-917-859-8328, [email protected] Fivel Rothberg: +1-215-990-4442, [email protected] Rami Younis: +972-54-320-1894, [email protected], Logline The story of a city that once connected Palestine to the world. Synopsis There are moments when time abruptly stops, when daily routines are forever interrupted and the order they maintain is turned upside down. Over the course of two days in July of 1948, the city of Lyd, in what was then Palestine, experienced one of these moments. When Palmach soldiers (a Zionist militia) invaded the city, they found it swollen with refugees who had already been forced to leave their towns and villages in order to make way for the new State of Israel. Lyd was one of the few remaining Palestinian strongholds. However, after two days of ferce resistance, the Palmach persevered and the fghting culminated in the massacre of hundreds of civilians and the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the city. Today, Lyd is called Lod in Hebrew and it is known for two things: it sits beside Israel’s international airport and it is the epicenter of Israel’s drug trade. It is also the site of contemporary displacement. New waves of religious Jewish settlers - supported by the State of Israel - have moved in to resettle the city, building new state-subsidised Jewish-only neighborhoods. The mayor, a Trump-like bombastic fgure, has openly proclaimed that the far-right Jewish groups “saved the city” from the Arab threat. This wave of ethnic cleansing and apartheid began in 1948, but continues today as an ongoing Nakba, or catastrophe. This feature length hybrid documentary/fction flm uses multiple voices and stylistic approaches to question the construction of history and the shape of the present. Observational, essayistic and hybrid, the flm combines vérité, drone footage, archival and testimonies to create a visually striking storyscape. By weaving together different character-based vignettes rooted in Lyd, the flm creates a vivid portrait of a splintered community: Palestinian elders remember the events that turned their world upside down; Zionist soldiers return to the scene of the massacre and expulsion they committed in 1948; Jewish settlers re-shape Lyd in their own image, burying Palestinian archaeological sites in the process; a young educator fghts to preserve Palestinian identity for the next generation; all the while, Lydian refugees bide time in a refugee camp for 70 years. Elias Khoury wrote, “The specifcity of the Palestinian Nakba...is a continuous tragedy without borders in space and time.” Lyd in Exile will explore how multiple pasts and presents convene in one city with an open wound that stretches far beyond its borders. But the flm also asks the audience to consider an alternative — or “What if?” — narrative. What if this moment never occured? What would an alternate present, not scorched by this foundational violence, look like? In collaboration with the flm’s characters and visual effects supervisor Suhel Nafar, we will develop fctional scenes that depict an alternate present that never experienced the massacre and expulsion. These scenes will be woven into the flm like surreal punctuation marks. Street names will change, houses will be re-built and people will have never been expelled. Treatment Present: Your blood has changed? The flm opens with vérité footage of present day Lyd, showing the mix of people who live in the city: Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and immigrants from all over the world. Residents talk to camera about how they view the city. A Palestinian baker talks about discrimination in Lyd; a man with a huge star of David around his neck shares that he was one of the frst people in the city in 1948; a group of men explain that their families have been racing horses in Lyd for hundreds of years, and even though the city tries to prevent them from doing it, they will never stop. We enter the house of Manar Memeh, a 34 year old Palestinian educator from Lyd, as she prepares to leave for work. Her father picks grapes from the vine that has been in his family for generations as her niece cries, not wanting to be seperated from Manar for even a few hours. Manar comes from a family of native “Lyddians,” Palestinians who remained in Lyd after the Nakba. Through education, she tries to maintain Palestinian identity and narrative — a task that, we learn through her character, is almost impossible. We see Manar in her daily life, socializing with her Palestinian friends from the city, with her family members, and in her work at an Israeli NGO that supports young school students who excel in various felds. The NGO has four branches in Lyd: three for Jewish Israelis, and one for Palestinians. Manar’s employer sometimes resists her messages or methods, but they are not the only ones questioning her work. Her family, who raised her to be afraid of the painful past, also pushes back against her pedagogy, as do the young children she works with, who are paralyzed by confusion. During a vérité scene of an identity workshop that Manar conducts with Palestinian children in Lyd, we see that these eight year-olds lack knowledge of their history, narrative and identity. One boy says, “My blood was Palestinian but now it is Israeli.” To which Manar teasingly replies, “What? Your blood has changed?” Another child asks, “Why did the Jews choose this country?” After the workshops is over, Manar breaks down with her co-workers, she exclaims, “What will happen in ten years, there will be no Palestinians here.” The intensity of this scene is broken by slow shots of the pre-1948 Palestinian buildings that remain in Lyd. The facades are crumbling and weeds grow through the windows. Slowly, through textured animation, the structures start to rebuild themselves. Stone by stone the landscape changes and modern buildings crop up and integrate themselves with the historic structures, in a way that speaks to both progress and historic preservation. In this fantastical scene, we witness a different Lyd come into being. The scene fades out and we are back in reality. We fade up on towering glass and concrete buildings. At twenty stories, these immense structures dwarf the surrounding neighborhoods. Their facade is pristine, with small suggestions of life dotting the surface –– fower pots, israeli fags and wind chimes. The clothing of the residents reveal that they are Orthodox Jews. Children take scooters into the gated playground and men and women stroll around the grounds. Benny Printz, a spokesperson for this group, explains to camera that the neighborhood is called Ramat Elyashiv and that they are the Garin Torani, a group of Orthodox Jewish people who came to Lod decades ago. As we see more images of daily life, he explains that Garin translates to “seed” in English and the Garin Torani is one of many “seed communities” that exist in Israel. Most of the Garin have chosen to live in the North or in the South, in majority Arab neighborhoods. He continues to say that the community was started in Lod “in an effort to “re-invigorate the zionist ethos the country was founded with.” Adjacent to the Ramat Elyashiv settlement is the old Palestinian burial ground. We learn from Maha Nakib, a former Palestinian city councilwoman in Lyd, that Ramat Elyashiv was built on top of the Palestinian neighborhood that surrounded their cemetery. She explains how the city sold the Garin Torani the land for a dollar and removed the Palestinians who were living there in order to make way for the construction of the new neighborhood. In the offce of the municipality, we meet Aharon Atias, the General Director of the Municipality of Lod, as he monitors various parts of the city through security cameras. He shares with us that there is anoth- er neighborhood in Lyd that is being earmarked for “Jewish only” housing for Ultra Orthodox religious groups. We visit the site and, through drone footage, see that it takes up multiple hectares of the city. Back in the municipal building we meet Yair Revivo, the current mayor. Throughout his interview, he talks positively about “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs in the city. He pushes a marketing campaign that calls Lod “mosaic city,” where Arabs and immigrants serve to add local color. However his true self is revealed when, two days later, we see him barge into Dahmash Mosque to interrupt the Muslim holiday prayer. He physically confronts Palestinian worshipers because their call to prayer and religious chanting are “too loud,” shouting at the congregants to “stop making so much noise.” Outside of the mosque, etched into its facade, three plaques read: “The mosque was closed as a result of the monstrous massacre perpetrated by the occupation forces in 1948, and was partially reopened in 1996.” The camera then focuses on a sign in Hebrew pro- claiming the area in front of the mosque “Palmach Square,” after the Israeli soldiers who committed the massacre.