Haifa

Haifa, nicknamed after the city of his love and hope, goes around and comes around in a Palestinian refugee camp. Although he is everybody's fool, there are many things that only he knows. He is closely related to the family of Abu Said, a former policeman who gains new hopes from the political developments. Oum Said, his wife, hangs her hope on the imminent release of their eldest son, Said, from jail. She tries to find him a bride to secure things for the future. Their youngest son, Siad, is cynical and rebellious. He refuses to believe things. Sabah, the 12 year old daughter is romancing the future and wants to find out what's in it for her. The different stories are interwoven into a very timely insight into the current Palestinian mind.

2006, Baghdad is ravaged by sectarian violence. Haifa Street is the epicenter of the conflict. Ahmed gets dropped off there by a taxi on his way to his beloved Suad's home to ask for her hand for marriage, he gets shot by Salam, a sniper who's living his own personal hell on a rooftop above.

A documentary which chronicles the lives of an elder Palestinian generation who decided to stay in their homes in Haifa after 1948. The film's subjects are aged women and men who are over seventy, still living in Haifa, narrating their personal experience through the 1948 Nakba, when their families were exiled from their homeland.

In the 1950s Haifa’s Hadar neighbourhood was the lively heart of the city. Today, it is abandoned and neglected but its past is still present on every corner. The film portrays Hadar through the stories of a few of it’s most intriguing residents.

The film was shot entirely in a nightclub, with an adjoining contemporary art gallery, whose customers are both Israelis and Palestinians, in one of Israel’s most open cities, Haifa. A long night in a place where the most diverse people meet: Jews, Muslims, gays, heterosexuals, transvestites; and three women, who in that multifaceted microcosm, a gathering peaceful hideout, can find shelter from male bullying and arrogance.

Return to Haifa is based on Kanafani’s novel the plot of which takes place in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the newly occupied territories had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948.