Programs Calendar Films

“Yesterday we were thirteen, today we are fifty: days just go by…”. Bitter Water is a feature-length documentary about 4 generations of refugees in a Palestinian camp in Beirut.  For 54 years and over four generations, Palestinian refugees have lived in UN camps. Bourj El Barajneh, a refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, is home to 20,000 Palestinians who survive with no prospect of returning to Palestine, emigrating or assimilating into Lebanese society. The link with the past is fraying, and older people are trapped in a memory of a Palestine that younger people doubt they will ever see. They just want to escape. The camp is permeated with a sense of loss: “The vial of patience has been exhausted but for a single drop of bitter water and drink it I must…”

Maysoon Pachachi studied Philosophy at University College London (BA Hons) and graduated from the London Film School. She worked for many years as a documentary and fiction film editor in the UK and has taught film directing and editing in Britain and Palestine. She produced and edited Voices from Gaza, a Channel Four documentary that won a Red Ribbon Award in San Francisco. She has taught film directing and editing in Jerusalem and Gaza for the Jerusalem Film Institute and Med Media, a program of the EU, and at Birzeit University. With Kasim Abid, another British-based Iraqi filmmaker, she founded Independent Film and Television College in 2004.