Forbidden to Wander

Forbidden to Wander chronicles the experiences of a 25-year-old Arab American woman traveling on her own in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the summer of 2002. The film is a reflection on the complexity of Palestinian existence and the torturously disturbing “ordinariness” of living under constant curfew. The film’s title reflects this, as the Arabic words used to describe the imposed curfew “mane’ tajawwul” literally translate as “forbidden to wander”. The video is also the journey of personal discovery for the filmmaker, the wanderer who falls in love with a Palestinian man in Gaza.

At a historical moment when the American media, both for and against the Israeli occupation, regularly reduces Palestinian experiences to images of children throwing rocks at armed soldiers, Forbidden to Wander provides an opportunity for audiences to see Palestinians as three-dimensional human beings with interests and dreams that exceed, but are also compromised by, the conditions in which they live. Take Wassim, a Palestinian teenager living in Bethlehem who is into kickboxing and is a huge fan of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Wassim discusses the difficulty of seeing Van Damme films now that the local theater has been destroyed and recounts his disappointment and frustration at not being able to travel to Jerusalem to see Van Damme attend the world premiere of his latest film. Against the simplified depictions of a life dominated by violence, Forbidden to Wander shows the many seemingly mundane forms that oppression takes and the conditions that “normalize” hatred and mistrust as well as create the tragic explosions of violence that often serve as a starting (and ending) point for Western media coverage.