Everything seems oddly idyllic at the start: the hillside dotted with poppies where the grandfather tends to his flock, the field of purple flowers at the end of the road lined with olive trees where the grandmother cuddles her pet sheep. Their life and that of their family consists of everyday rituals of an unusual calm, even if the Afro-Palestinian Bedouin couple lives in a tent pitched illegally on unused land where the countryside meets the fringes of Amman. Their son, his wife and their children in another tent right next door. The animals are tended to, the cramped living spaces organised, the children sent off to school. But the world outside keeps creeping in: the racist comments the girl hears from her classmates about her skin colour, the grandmother’s recollections of fleeing during the Nakba massacres which come to chime with the television reports from the West Bank and Gaza, the inevitable arrival of the bulldozers. Guided by her own family’s experience of displacement, Asmahan Bkerat follows the daily lives of the Najar family with infinite patience and empathy, creating a space of calm intimacy that makes the subsequent hardships which soon emerge all the more heart-wrenching. Linking the Palestinian struggle to questions of racism, gentrification and generational conflict, Bkerat’s first feature documentary is a work of extraordinary precision and confidence.

James Lattimer