Under the arches of the historic Rajab Pasha House, where the stones of the eighteenth century breathe ancient history, the audience gathered this evening to watch the film “Exceptional Places,” a cinematic research work that breaks the silence around the intertwining of the Palestinian refugee tragedy and the violations of indigenous peoples’ rights in America.

Over 90 minutes, Lebanese-American director Malek Rasmani (a researcher at the University of Nanterre in Paris) led the audience on a visual journey between the camps of the West Bank and Lebanon and the “Native American” reservations from Arizona to South Dakota (2014-2017).

The film, produced by Rasmani in partnership with cultural organizer Matt Peterson, avoided using historical archives, preferring to document daily resistance as an act of existence: a Palestinian child drawing a map of his abandoned village on the camp wall, and a wedding in the “Lakota” reservation reviving dances that were forbidden a century ago.

Malek opened the dialogue with the youth by saying, “This is not a film about the past but about how our humanity is reduced in an isolated geography,” turning the house into a rich dialogue platform where the young Pierre confirmed that the film reminds us that Aleppo’s resilience itself is part of a city’s story resisting oblivion like the Indian reservations.

Malek Rasmani told SANA’s correspondent that his visit to Aleppo (his first to Syria) redefined the meaning of an exceptional place and he saw how destruction turns into a living memory, just like the camps. He pointed out that screening the film in Aleppo with a group of conscious youth aims to create a living archive of human struggles.

Rasmani indicated that the film was shown in the Middle East and Europe in 2019 and after COVID-19 it was screened in New York coinciding with the bombing of Gaza and received positive feedback.