Diana Allan
Directing
Biography
Diana Allan is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard University, was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2008 to 2012, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. Her most recent book ‘Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile’ (Stanford University Press, 2013) explores the contingencies of nationalism and everyday survival in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Diana is also the founder and co-director of the Nakba Archive, a testimonial project that has recorded over 650 interviews on film with first generation Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. During the 2006 Lebanon/Israel war she established ‘Lens on Lebanon’, a participatory film and photographic initiative funded by the Soros Foundation, Oxfam and the Prince Claus Fund.
Known For
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
Sweetgrass
Using found footage from the colonial archives of British Mandate Palestine (1917 – 1948) and audio recordings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Partition brings forth histories that have long existed at the margins. Co-director of the Nakba Archive, Diana Allan, re-photographs colonial found footage on 16mm to powerfully resituate Palestinian presence through story, voice and song.
Partition
"The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes... I was twelve years old… I've been here for 60 years." A beautiful, poignant documentary, Still Life examines the effect a collection of personal photos showing life in Palestine before the 1948 displacement have on an elderly Palestinian fisherman living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of place and memory in preserving a people's history are crucial to Diana Allan's illuminating documentary. In, Said Ismael Otruk, a Palestinian man born in Acre in the 1930s, recalls his childhood and the halcyon days of his youth. His memories, not always accurate, so he relies on the photographs he managed to take with him. They are images of young boys, of the port, of fishing boats and the sea. On one, he reads a note he wrote many years ago: "Acre and Said in the Golden Age."
Still Life
Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history. An anthropologist, author (her most recent book is "Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile) and filmmaker, Diana Allan documents the experiences of the Ibrahim family, who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The film looks at their relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they've persevered in this ‘temporary' home. Produced at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Terrace of the Sea is a haunting work, a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and - between seeing and being seen.
Terrace of the Sea
In this two-part tour through the streets of Lebanon, a colorful Palestinian cab driver offers offhand insight into the region’s fraught political and social climate through boisterous serenades and excitable outbursts.