I needed to make a film about Palestinian women persevering

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Elizabeth Vibert focuses on her film Aisha's Story.

"When are you going to make a film about Palestinian women?"

The young woman in the audience didn't know how hard her question would land.

We were at the Rainbow Theater in Amman, Jordan, where I was screening The Thinking Garden at the UN Women film festival in early 2018, and the red velvet seats were full. (We'd had a lively  — read: fraught — discussion at the outset about whether to screen with Arabic or English subtitles, and the vote was for Arabic. The young tourists I talked with afterward assured me they'd enjoyed the visuals.)

The woman's question caught me at the right moment. The Thinking Garden was my first film, which I had written and co-produced with director Christine Welsh, bringing on cinematographer Moira Simpson and my longtime research collaborator Basani Ngobeni. 

Ngobeni and I had been working on an oral history project with older women farmers in Limpopo province, South Africa, for several years. The Thinking Garden was based in that research and was at the direct request of the farmers: "Aren't you going to make a film about us?" 

It was a short step from that question to "When are you going to make a film about Palestinian women?"

I'm a historian of colonialism. When I began research with small-scale farmers in South Africa, I had lofty academic questions about how the emergence of democracy intersected with, or was undermined by, the global political economy. 

The farmers had plenty to say on that score — things were very challenging on the ground — but the stories that captivated me were about how women who appear in global metrics as "the poorest of the poor" were able to craft dignified, autonomous, often joyous lives for themselves and their families.

I've taught the history of Israel and the Palestinian territories over the years as a complex instance of coexistence upended by colonization and nationalism. When I was introduced to miller Aisha Azzam during that trip to Jordan in 2018, I quickly realized her personal history was a microcosm of a wider colonial history and, at the same time, a story I knew — a story of strong women resisting those shackles and persisting in the face of injustice.

Azzam has lived in a refugee camp in Jordan since she was 10. Her family fled there, joining other Palestinians from Jerusalem District in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. She and her late husband, Hassan, raised 12 children in the camp, establishing their grain mill in 1987. 

Milling is an ancestral tradition. Azzam still cherishes the grinding stone her grandmother brought with her into exile when she fled British Palestine in 1948, and Azzam teaches her grandchildren to mill wheat on that stone.

Azzam and I had our first conversation in the mill. Now working with her son, she stone-mills grains and herbs in the traditional forms used in Palestinian cuisine. I was charmed by her — her wry humour and warmth, her intelligence and her firm attachment to Palestine, the homeland she hasn't seen since childhood. 

During that first visit, I interrupted at one point to say, "Aisha, it sounds like you're holding up Palestinian food culture in the camp." She responded, her eyes shining, "I am single-handedly holding up Palestinian food culture in the camp." She drew me into her laughter. A friendship blossomed across the linguistic and cultural gap. 

We worked on our oral history project together on a few visits, before the pandemic shut down international travel. I came to see Azzam's work as sumud — the Palestinian practice of resistance through steadfastness. As her son, Omar, told us (and says in the film), "Every Palestinian has a role in resistance. My mother's role is to protect the heritage, and that's a noble act."

Aisha's Story draws on the life experience and expertise of Palestinians in Baqa'a refugee camp and beyond. We trained young people in the community to work on our crew as camera operators, sound crew and in other key roles. 

Salam Barakat Guenette — who grew up in exile in Amman and whose mother taught at Baqa'a schools back when families like Azzam's were still living in tents — joined our team as an interpreter and quickly became a co-producer. Azzam's adult children, neighbours and others in the camp generously shared their insights. Theirs are the voices of one major strand of Palestinian experience, the exiles in refugee camps.

The audience watching The Thinking Garden at Rainbow Theater was uplifted by the story and cheered the efforts of older women to resist the pressures of global capital and the climate crisis while pursuing their identity as collaborative farmers.  

At a tragic time in the history of the Palestinian people, Aisha's Story will have audiences cheering again as — through the lens of co-director Chen Wang — it intimately captures Azzam preparing food with her daughters and grandchildren. 

Hands at work are so prominent in the film that we contemplated calling it Hand in Hand/Yad bi Yad. Harvesting, milling, cooking and feasts ground the film's arc of displacement, longing, steadfastness and resistance. In the end, Azzam tells us, "Food is what keeps us together as Palestinians." 

Aisha's Story screens at Hot Docs on April 26 and 28. More information is available by clicking here.