The film

On the edge of the Negev desert, a group of young Palestinians confronts the Israeli military occupation with cameras and nonviolent actions, reclaiming the land taken from their families.

Synopsis

On the edge of the Negev desert, a group of young Palestinians fights against the Israeli military occupation. “Youth of Sumud” — the youth of perseverance — seeks to return to its people the land taken from their families by restoring the ancient cave village of Sarura. They face aggression with nonviolent actions, defending themselves from rifles with their cameras; they oppose desolation and death with hope and life.
Ten years after their first documentary about the nonviolent struggle in the West Bank, the directors return to the village of At-Tuwani to show how the children portrayed in the film have grown, using archival material spanning more than 15 years.

Context

Sarura is a village in the southern part of the West Bank, under Israeli civil and military control (Area C), between the city of Hebron and the Negev Desert, near the Israeli settlements of Ma’on and Avigayil.
The people of Sarura lived through a subsistence economy based on raising animals and cultivating olive trees. At the end of the 1990s, the village was completely abandoned following continuous attacks by settlers from the outposts of Havat Ma’on and Avigayil, who had recently established themselves in the area, and threats from Israeli soldiers who had begun preventing the residents from using their land in order to avoid contact between Palestinians and Israelis.
While Sarura was evacuated — a fate shared by other villages in the area — the inhabitants of nearby At-Tuwani managed to resist attempts to expel them by forming a popular struggle committee. They avoided evacuation and continued for years to assert their right to remain on their land, carrying out peaceful demonstrations against government dictates and continuing to graze on the land from which they had been barred.
With the help of international organisations such as Operazione Colomba, Israeli activists from Ta’ayush and other solidarity groups, the inhabitants were never alone. Over the years they were able to document what was happening in the area, often providing video material for trials brought against Palestinian activists and presenting evidence of violations committed by Israelis, in an effort to show the apartheid policy enacted by the Israeli government.

At-Tuwani — 10 years later

We told the story of the village of At-Tuwani in our first film, “Tomorrow’s Land - How We Decided to Tear Down the Invisible Wall” (2011), centred on the experience of the nonviolent popular struggle committee in the South Hebron Hills.
In 2018, we returned to At-Tuwani to tell the story of “Youth of Sumud”, a collective of teenagers and young people born and raised under military occupation and within the village’s popular struggle. The boys and girls of YOS are the children we filmed ten years earlier making the exhausting journey from the village of Tuba to At-Tuwani, escorted by army soldiers; they are the children we watched walk to school and dream of the end of the occupation.
The young people of YOS decided not only to continue the committee’s nonviolent resistance, but also to reclaim the land taken from their fellow villagers. They moved into the evacuated caves of Sarura, worked to restore life to the village by planting olive trees, continued to monitor the lives of shepherds and attacks by settlers with cameras and mobile phones, and told the world what was happening in the South Hebron Hills through Facebook.
They do not know what their future will be. Born and raised under military occupation, they search in the present for openings towards a life without oppression and violence, while continuing to live their lives with the smile of someone who has not lost faith in humanity.

Director’s notes

In 2010, the Italian association Operazione Colomba invited us to visit the village of At-Tuwani, where it had maintained an unarmed monitoring and accompaniment presence for several years, to tell the story of the nonviolent resistance of the Popular Committee of the South Hebron Hills. We were a group of filmmakers at the beginning of our careers, confronting for the first time a political issue as sensitive as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the military occupation of the West Bank.
To keep the promise we had made to the local shepherds and committee activists, we returned to Italy and produced “Tomorrow’s Land - How We Decided to Tear Down the Invisible Wall” through crowdfunding, a documentary made possible by hundreds of supporters and screenings that took place in many Italian and international cities.
For us, Sarura is a return to the same village ten years later, a new promise to give visibility to the incredible story of resistance by the shepherds and the people of the South Hebron Hills, told through the voices of their children — those who were only boys and girls in Tomorrow’s Land and who grew up continuing to face the abuses and violence caused by settlement expansion projects and the occupation of their fathers’ land.
We chose to tell the story from their point of view, spending several weeks with the young people of Youth of Sumud, sleeping with them in the caves of Sarura, accompanying them to school, and witnessing the constant provocations by settlers and intimidation by soldiers at the boundaries of their village, just a few hundred metres from their homes. We spoke with them, trying to understand the aspirations of a young person who grows up and lives in a constantly threatened village while studying by the light of an LED lamp to prepare for law exams.
Young men and women who dream of living a normal life, getting married, having children and building a future in ordinary conditions, wondering whether to leave a devastated land or remain there to continue a struggle that seems eternal but is also necessary and legitimate. We decided to tell the story of Youth of Sumud because it could offer a concrete example of hope: a peaceful struggle guided by human dignity, whose outcome remains uncertain but whose ending is written through each person’s story. A small story compared with History with a capital H, yet at the same time universal and representative of a conflict that seems never to end.