Lyd

The capsule summary for Lyd by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland is an intriguing one. It describes itself as a ‘Sci fi documentary’ told from the point of view of the city of Lyd in Israel (or Palestine, depending who you ask.) So we get the city itself narrating her story (voiced by Maisaa Abd El-Hadi.) This device is quite like that used in Tom Robbins’ novel Skinny Legs and All, which featured a Jerusalem which was breezy yet philosophical about the aeons of bloodshed she has seen.

But where Robbins’ novel mined a rich and creative seam of magical realism, this film is grounded by low key interviews with anonymous talking heads (participants are not identified as they are introduced, which seems a severe oversight, even though they are all finally listed in the end credits – in a confusing jumble of Arabic and western lettering.) 

Lyd (the Arabic name), or Lod (in Hebrew) is an ancient town of strategic importance within the center of the Holy Land. It neighbors Ben Gurion airport but has been a revered hub of Christian and Muslim culture for fifteen hundred years, so it is a good case study for unpacking the story of opposed times and peoples. 

“…a ‘Sci fi documentary’ told from the point of view of the city of Lyd in Israel…”

It is up to a point. The film footage of Lyd clearly undermines the Jewish assertion that Palestine was a barely civilized heap prior to modern Israel’s 1948 invention in the Balfour Declaration. Before that it was evidently a modern city that already had an airport and a rather grand train station.

When the city speaks it does so from an alternate reality, realized with some basic animation by Egyptian Samakas Studio. It depicts a paradigm where the birth of Israel, known to Arabs as The Naqba (The Catastrophe) never occurred.

These segments avoid all mention of Palestinian or pan-Arab aggression, instead insisting that Muslim rule would have been a harmonious plurality for all faiths, even though the 1945 population of 20,000 was 90 percent Muslim and 10 per cent Christian, with just twenty Jews on record, which makes it hard to swallow the line given here.