Saturday, March 29, 2025, 2:30–3:30pm at the Tranzac Club

Terrace of the Sea
Diana Allan • 52 min • USA/Palestine/Lebanon • 2009

In Terrace of the Sea, anthropologist, author, and filmmaker Diana Allan offers a sensorial glimpse into the lives of the Ibrahim family, a displaced family who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The family live in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 as a result of the Nakba, on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon.

Composed almost entirely of static shots and voiceovers, which are punctuated with folk songs, and anchored in a collection of family photographs taken over three generations, the film looks at the family’s relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they’ve persevered in this ‘temporary’ home. In actuality, they have been living in this camp for fifty-eight years. The big blue sea, fishing nets, a little girl with a balloon, women chatting, a temporary permanent home, memories of meeting a love, memories of being in an Israeli prison, the sound of the sea, shadows flickering, light bending, and lamenting folk songs. Through attending to the environment itself, Allan disrupts the continuity of linear narrative and explores an alternate experience of time, where past and present, old and new, sit side by side. The film examines the family’s history not solely or primarily through the lens of nationalist politics, but through their life as fishermen and sensory details of everyday life and living.

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