Aisha’s Story
(Canada, 62 min.)
Dir. Elizabeth Vibert
Programme: World Showcase (World premiere)
In Elizabeth Vibert’s Aisha’s Story, one woman’s loving efforts to uphold her culinary roots come to represent a larger struggle to safeguard Palestinian heritage. Aisha Azzam has lived in the Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan –– home to 100,000 Palestinians who were displaced from the West Bank by Israeli forces –– since its founding in 1968. She spends most of her days milling grain and preparing dishes like maftoul, musakhan, and mahalabia for friends and family. She understands the palpable power that food can wield, and throughout the film, it serves as a site of collectivity and communal bonding –– not just for her own large family, which boasts 12 children and 22 grandchildren, but among the wider Palestinian population the camp has housed for decades.
This stripped-down documentary –– cutting to credits after a fleet 57 minutes –– was shot in 2022 and 2023 before the Israeli genocide began in full force. In spite of its brevity, the film commendably affords its subjects ample space to air their grievances with the occupation that shaped their lives. Archival photos of Baqa’a in its early days are contrasted with images of life in the West Bank, while Aisha and her neighbour relay anecdotes of oppression and resilience. (Sumud, the Palestinian notion of steadfast resistance, is not mentioned in the film, but is evoked in relation to its subject by Vibert in a recent article for the CBC.) As Aisha shows her grandchildren how to mill grain –– using the same stone her grandmother took with her during the flight from their home in Bayt Mahsir in 1948 –– she tells them about their history as farmers who worked the land (for wheat, lentils, fava beans, figs, olives, pomegranates; everything the abundant land could offer) before the meddling British gave Israeli settlers the means and motive to oust them.
Aisha’s Story is at its best when it allows the eponymous subject to convey her family’s personal and political histories, her gustatory passions, and their lasting relevance to Baqa’a on her own terms. Too often, however, Vibert’s guiding hand is felt in the margins of the frame. Her camera glides over landscapes and zeroes in on food preparation with a timidity that could be construed as incurious. The director is an associate professor in the department of history at UVIC, and Aisha’s Story is the second in a four-film series produced by Vibert entitled “Four Stories About Food Sovereignty,” which combines her academic interests of food security and colonial histories.
These credentials place the film’s form — by turns sentimental and instructional — in a clearer light. The camera’s perspective is evidently Western, as are its most intrusive formal choices: saccharine piano cues frequently cheapen the all too real emotions that grip the screen, and ambrosial meals are shot with the visual language of cooking show B-roll. Though Vibert seems to have taken measures to step back from her material and place it in the hands of her subjects, the director’s sensibilities remain the film’s dominant force.
The moments of intimacy, care, and tactility that emerge –– and there are many –– seem to do so independently from the efforts of Vibert and her crew. Though this well-intentioned doc fails to meaningfully aestheticize the currents of cultural preservation and exchange it’s built upon –– or productively interrogate its aesthetic viewpoint –– Aisha’s Story coasts on the simple fact of telling Aisha’s story. It is one worth telling, and one worth hearing, but it is also one whose methods of telling warrant questioning, especially in a moment where stories of Palestinian resistance –– and hopefully, of liberation –– begin to become more commonplace in Western cultural spheres.
