At the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, ‘Lyd’ Connects the Nakba to Today

Lydda does not appear on a contemporary map of Israel. You will find Lod, though, in the center of the country, 14 miles from Tel Aviv and 29 miles from Jerusalem in the opposite direction. The remains of the Christian martyr St. George have resided in this place for many centuries, while the modern international airport dates to the mid-1930s.

Lydda connected Palestine with the Arab world until 1948, we’re informed at the beginning of Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s documentary Lyd. In fact, Lyd herself (Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi) narrates the film (in Arabic, of course), which receives its Bay Area premiere in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Sunday, July 28 at the Vogue Theater and Tuesday, July 30 at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.

The creative decision to “cast” Lyd as a character recounting her story has a slightly fanciful aspect, underscored by animated sequences that conjure life in previous eras. But the filmmakers’ decision to make what they call “a sci-fi documentary,” that in part imagines how the city would have developed without Israeli occupation and resettlement, is nonetheless grounded in reality.

This is not the first film to unearth the Nakba, when approximately 750,000 Palestinian residents were exiled and hundreds killed during the war triggered by Israel’s declaration of independence. Israelis still celebrate their victory, of course, and their then-leader David Ben-Gurion, while Palestinians record the date as the beginning of their national tragedy.

Al Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 screened at the 1998 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it played like a corrective to the mythic history that Israelis and American Jews tell themselves. The shrines that displaced Palestinians made of their house keys, dreaming of the day they would return, still stick with me.

Lyd, which premiered last August at the Amman International Film Festival, implicitly acknowledges that most if not all Palestinians had reluctantly accepted that return was never going to happen long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the horrific war in Gaza waged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So if history has moved on in a very tangible way, what are Younis and Friedland’s goals? Any impulse to advocate, it strikes me, would feel aspirational rather than attainable in the present moment, and out of touch. An earnest exposé of injustice and suffering, on the other hand, though always valuable, faces the hurdle of getting people to listen, to discover, to be surprised.

Hence the idea of engaging the viewer’s imagination with speculative or alternative history. And the non-traditional technique of Lyd narrating, despite the challenge of creating a voice that is powerful and moving without veering into self-parody.

The trickiest part of the whole endeavor is nailing a consistent tone, and Younis and Friedland don’t pull it off. But although Lyd is uneven, it gets points for ambition.

The first consideration in any film about the Palestinians and Israelis is how far into the past you go. Lyd sets its starting point in 1918 after World War I, when the British empire claimed swaths of the Middle East that had been under Ottoman rule. But its focus is 1948, and the massacre of Palestinian residents in a Lydda mosque by the Israel Defense Forces.

Lyd draws on raw video interviews conducted in 1989 with Israeli veterans of the events to depict a scene where — in an act of swift, bloody opportunism or in the fog of war — soldiers killed dozens of civilians who had packed the sacred, and presumably safe, house of worship. In the present day, Palestinian elder Eissa Fanous powerfully recalls how, as a boy, he was forced by soldiers to carry bodies from the mosque.

Damning as evidence of Israeli behavior at the time and the long-running desire to cover it up, the sequence is nonetheless assembled in a way that some viewers could dismiss it as propaganda. It’s impossible to credibly levy that charge against Tantura, Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz’s deep dive into another 1948 massacre that’s now streaming on Kanopy after screening at SFJFF two years ago.

For viewers unfamiliar with the 1948 events that still cast a shadow, Lyd provides a decent introduction. For audiences who aren’t aware of the injustice and discrimination that the Israeli government continues to inflict — such as home demolitions and land confiscations — the documentary gives voice to Lod’s current Palestinian residents.

“The story of Lyd is the story of Palestine,” Maisa Abd Elhadi tells us early in the film. It is inevitable that Lyd leaves us in the present, where nothing is resolved or solved.

‘Lyd’ screens as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival at 12:30 p.m. on July 28, 2024 at the Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento St., San Francisco) and at 3:45 p.m. on July 30, 2024 at the Piedmont Theatre (4186 Piedmont Ave. #5133, Oakland).