Concrete Land

The Najar family is one of the last Afro-Palestinian Bedouin families still living in tents. Around their camp near Amman, luxury homes are closing in. Palestinian filmmaker Asmahan Bkerat followed the family for eight years, which gives the film a remarkable intimacy.

The camera becomes part of the family’s everyday life, in which everyone looks after each other, however harsh the circumstances. The grandfather, who tends sheep and works a small plot of land, is determined to stay where he is, but his son, a truck driver and father of a large family, is more realistic. He knows they are living on land that has been sold, meaning they could be evicted at any moment. Meanwhile, his daughter Eman, who is ten years old at the start of the film, grows into a teenager who wants nothing more than to be like other girls her age.

As bulldozers level the land around them and the genocide in Gaza unfolds in the background, the family faces an impossible dilemma: try to build an uncertain nomadic life elsewhere or move to the concrete jungle.