A World Not Ours: Intimate, Humorous, Award-Winning Portrait of a Lebanese Refugee Camp

A WORLD NOT OURS, an intimate, humorous and moving portrait of three generations of exiles in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh in southern Lebanon, opens Friday, May 23 for an exclusive engagement at IFC Center. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for the Viewfinders section of the 2013 edition of DOC NYC, the film has won some 30 international awards and been showcased in scores of festivals across the globe.

Filmed over more than 20 years by multiple generations of the same family and based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, A WORLD NOT OURS is a sensitive and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family.

A WORLD NOT OURS, says writer-director Mahdi Fleifel, is a film “about memory and ’the need to remember’… Forgetting for us Palestinians would simply mean ceasing to exist. Making my film is a way of reinforcing and strengthening our collective memory. But most important, it was to make a record of my own family history, a history of three generations, a record of a dispossessed family living as refugees in Lebanon and emigrants in Europe. It was an attempt at exploring the state of being an exile.”

Ein el-Helweh (literally “Sweet Spring”) is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon with over 70,000 people living in an area of 1 square kilometer. Set up by the United Nations Relief Agency (UNWRA) in 1948, the camp is today an island of Palestine surrounded by Lebanese army checkpoints. While its inhabitants are able to leave Ein el-Helweh, they are barred from traveling abroad and, since the Lebanese state regards them as foreigners, they have no economic, political, or social rights.

Writer-director Mahdi Fleifel is a Palestinian filmmaker based in London. He was born in Dubai, raised in the Ain El-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon and later in the suburbs of Elsinore, Denmark. He graduated from the British National Film and Television School in 2009. His fiction and nonfiction short films have screened at more than a hundred festivals around the world and have won many best film awards. A WORLD NOT OURS is his first feature film.

For showtimes, advance tickets and more information, visit ifccenter.com