It is 2004. I have just received my American passport after eighteen years of waiting to be granted citizenship. Finally, for the first time in my life, I can travel to Jaffa, now a part of Israel. My mother, a Palestinian, has never returned to her birth city since fleeing with her family in 1948. She has no right of return. My mission is to find her home. But I can not find it. The markers have been obliderated from the landscape. What I find instead is my Palestinian idenity, and a home in the struggle for peace and justice in a free Palestinian state. "Where the Birds Fly " filmed in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Colorado/USA. 2005. |
