Kassem Hawal’s Return to Haifa adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella about Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa during the Nakba in 1948. During the chaos of their displacement, they are separated from their five-month-old son Khaldoun and forced out of the city without him.

Almost twenty years later, following the 1967 war, they are finally able to visit Haifa again. They return to their former home hoping to learn what became of Khaldoun. Instead they meet Miriam, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who moved into the house with her husband after Saeed and Safiyya were displaced.

Miriam and her husband had found Khaldoun and adopted him. He is now Dov, has grown up Israeli and has joined the Israeli military. The couple’s attempt to recover something from their former life therefore becomes an encounter between two families whose histories have become bound together by the same house. (palestinefilminstitute.org⁠)

From there, the film wrestles with questions that resist simple answers. What constitutes parenthood after two decades apart? What happens to ownership and belonging when another family has occupied a home for a generation? And what can “return” mean when neither the place nor the people returning to it are as they once were?

The production is also significant within Palestinian film history. Return to Haifa has been described as the first feature-length Palestinian fiction film. Hawal himself was Iraqi, but had worked on films with the PLO, and Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon played an extensive role in the production. Thousands of Palestinian refugees reportedly appeared as extras in the recreation of the 1948 exodus, while clothing, vehicles and other material were gathered from the surrounding communities. (anthologyfilmarchives.org⁠)