My Father's House
Fall Grants 2020 - Production Stage
Mahdi Fleifel / Feature Documentary / Denmark, United Kingdom, Palestine, Qatar / Original Language: Arabic, Danish, English / Interests: Biography, Immigration, Identity, Creative Documentary
Synopsis
In 2012, two weeks after ‘A World Not Ours’ was completed, my father died at the age of 59. He didn’t leave much behind—only a rusty Mercedes and a few thousand dollars in a bank account in Lebanon. But he did leave behind an old Samsonite full of photographs from his youth, and boxes filled with videotapes from the past 11 years of his life. In 2009, my father went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, apparently on a spiritual journey, though he was mostly interested in filming. Eventually, someone had had enough and confronted my father, “Do you think you’re on a safari trip?”— “No”, my father had replied, “This is footage for my son”. What did my father want to tell me with his recordings? And who was my father, really, in the time before I was born in Dubai, and after my parents’ divorce in Denmark? This is a personal story about memory, exile, about a father and his son, and a family bond through three generations. An expansion of the universe from my first feature, ‘A World Not Ours’.
Credits
- Director
- Mahdi Fleifel
- Screenwriter
- Mahdi Fleifel
- Producer
- Mahdi Fleifel
- Production Company
- Nakba FilmWorks
About the Director
A graduate of the UK National Film & Television School, Mahdi Fleifel lives and works between Denmark, England and Greece. Fleifel’s critically acclaimed debut, ‘A World Not Ours’, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received over 30 awards. In 2016 Fleifel won a Silver Bear for ‘A Man Returned’. His follow up, ‘A Drowning Man’, was selected in the Official Competition at Cannes, and was nominated for a BAFTA. ‘I Signed the Petition’, won Best Documentary Short at IDFA and was nominated for the 2018 European Film Awards. His most recent piece, 3 LOGICAL EXITS, premiered in the Tiger Shorts Competition in Rotterdam 2020.