Azza El-Hassan
Directing
Biography
Azza El-Hassan is a winner of various film international awards such as, The ALEPH DOCUMENTARY AWARD, LUCHINO VISCONTI AWARD, JAZEERA JURY AWARD and the prestigious GRIERSON AWARD. Her work usually centers around narratives in the middle East with a special focus on the Palestinian war. Azza has a special interest in the use of visual archive, in films by nations who’s archive, has been destroyed or abducted. In 2019, she founded THE VOID PROJECT, a multi media art project, that aims to restore archival films, curate exhibitions and produce narratives that centres around archive and the effect of their abduction on narratives.
Known For
3 CM LESS (the title comes from projections that the Palestinian children of today will grow up on average three centimeters shorter than their parents, thanks to the deprivations of occupation) is a complex, highly personal look at the impact decades of war has wreaked on families and friendships.
3 cm Less
The films in the PLO Media Unit were supposed to show a self-determined image of Palestinian reality – and they went missing during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. In a « road movie » from Palestine to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, director Azza El-Hassan follows the contradicting and confusing clues as to the whereabouts of the lost archive.
Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image
As times get tougher in the Arab world, people reminisce about the greatest diva of all time: Asmahan. Today, many Arabs go to Vienna in search of the dream that was whispered to them. But things are not that simple. Singer and actress Asmahan is a Syrian princess who emigrated to Egypt in the 1920s and where she enjoyed a career in show business, eventually becoming an Egyptian Diva.
The Unbearable Presence of Asmahan
Azza El-Hassan's film portrayal of her neighbourhood of Ramallah, a town under fire in the current Middle East conflict. With the threat of violence severely limiting locals' activities, filming becomes the main event, especially for a group of children.
News Time
A Palestinian journalist questions the expansion of Israeli settlements and the devastating consequences it brings to long-term Arab villagers. Her investigation leads her to various testimonies - by human rights activists and architects, by Israeli townspeople and particularly by suffering Palestinian villagers whose claim to land is supposedly "less ancient" than the Jews.
Title Deed from Moses
From the personal photo album of Palestinian photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawherieh, El Hassan reconstructs the last five minutes of Hani Jawherieh’s life, who was killed while filming in the mountains in Lebanon. The five minutes were featured in Palestine in the Eye (1977) a film made by the Palestine Film Institute to commemorate the life of one of it’s founders. Yet, forty-two years later, what motivates these images takes on a different turn in A Remake of a Revolutionary Film.