Partition

Synopsis

Partition fuses archival material from the British occupation of Palestine (1917-1948) with audio recordings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, tracing lines of continuity left by a seismic displacement. The silent archival films gathered in imperial collections contain scarcely told stories and colonial ways of seeing that seep into the present; Allan refilms the archival footage on 16 mm and employs dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to examine it.

Recovering Palestinian presence through storytelling, voice and song, and unravelling colonial pasts through the soundscapes of a precarious present, Partition is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.

Biography and Films

Diana Allan is a filmmaker and professor of anthropology at McGill University. She is the co-director of the Nakba Archive and holds a Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives. Her publications include Voices of the Nakba: A living history of Palestine (2021) and Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (2014).

Diana Allan is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and holds the Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives. She is also the founder and co-director of the Nakba Archive, a testimonial project that has recorded on video more than 650 interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. Her publications include Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine (2021) and Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (2014). Her films include titles such as Still Life (2007) and Terrace of the Sea (2009). Partition premiered worldwide in 2025 at the Rotterdam festival.