Review: A World Not Ours

For 60 years, more than 70,000 people have lived in the one square kilometre that constitutes Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon. It's an unlikely subject for a humorous, feel-good picture, but, working from footage shot by different generations of his video-obsessed family, that's precisely what film-maker Mahdi Fleifel has created. The director was raised mostly in Denmark, but spent his summer holidays in Ain al-Hilweh with his extended family and a grandfather who wouldn't live anywhere else. A sometime resident of a sometime place, Fleifel brings a light, accessible touch – and an authorial larkishness not entirely unlike Morgan Spurlock – to all the contradictions that come with exile and temporariness.

“Time doesn’t interest me,” says one of the residents. “That’s why I don’t wear a watch.” Passing decades are marked by World Cups, when these technically stateless folk adopt faraway footballing nations to support as their own. They have no formal identity in a place where identity papers are required. This dispossession is compounded by discrimination and deprivation. But the emerging culture has, paradoxically, yielded a rich seam of storytelling and a warm togetherness.