Director

Lina Al Abed

Lebanon, Palestine, Denmark, Slovenia | 2019 | 75 min | Arabic, with English Subtitles

• Producer Rami El Nihawi
• Production Company SakaDo, Idioms Film
• Screenplay Lina Al Abed, Rami El Nihawi
• Cinematography Rami El Nihawi
• Editing Rami  El Nihawi, Nabil Mehchi
• Sound Roar Skau Olsen
• Cast
• Contacts

  Idioms Film

  info@idiomsfilm.com

About the Film

In her feature-length documentary, Ibrahim, A Fate to Define (2019), young Palestinian filmmaker Lina Al Abed tries aims to present her father’s biography—a Palestinian militant in The Revolutionary Council (Abu Nidal Organization), who was "martyred" in 1987, only a few years after she was born. Because she didn’t get the chance to live with him long enough, or get to know him, this film represents to her a journey through memory and history, and the hidden, mysterious, or simply unknown details. She attempts to outline the features of a man, whose martyrdom remains very confusing, through others’ stories; his relatives, acquaintances, and comrades of arms and struggle.

Al Abed states that her father was a secret member of an organization known for suspicious intelligence activities and relations, and that one day in 1987, he left on a regular mission. "He was gone, never to return," leaving her to grow up in a home “filled with silence” as Najat Ali, her Egyptian mother, took care of her and her four siblings in Damascus.

Numerous personalities emerge as the director searches for details that are to reveal the mysteries of her father's life; the father who spent his life as an activist in an organization that would later become a burden on the Palestinian cause—and on the Palestinian people in general—due to its involvement in suspicious actions. This becomes an essential aspect of the film, as Al Abed faces—through the testimony of her father’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances—ethical, humanitarian and existential questions regarding a struggle to which Ibrahim dedicated his entire life.

The geographical journey extends from Beirut to Cairo, from Amman to Berlin, and then to Palestine. Palestine is the beginning of the story, the essence of the narrative, the origin of the journey, and the core of all the questions. However, some mysteries remain covered behind the father's disappearance, and behind the story of a man’s decisions that may still affect his family’s choices today.

Nadim Jarjoura