Baisanos

Following the Baisanos, the passionate fans of Club Deportivo Palestino, a Chilean first-division football team founded in 1920, the film moves between two narrators who embody Chile and Palestine, reflecting on identity, the meaning of return, and the many ways of going back.

In the final seconds of Baisanos, a shiver might run down the viewer’s spine, provoked by a carefully composed image of a people suddenly united in their separation. It echoes another, older image, which serves as a threshold to this one but whose revelation is delayed. The camera first skims the surface, gliding from top to bottom in order to take stock of the material and a few fragments – a blue sky, the stands, a ball, a goalie’s glove – before the frame gradually widens until its two central figures come into view. One wears a jersey in the colours of Palestine; the other, a dishdasha and a keffiyeh. They may be Oscar Fabbiani and Manuel Araya, two of the players who won the Chilean Cup in 1978 for Palestino, a club founded in 1920 by Palestinian exiles and often described as Chile’s second national team.

Two voices are attached to this image. A former leader of the Thaqafi Tulkarm club in the West Bank sees it as ‘proof that they haven’t forgotten us’. The voice of the writer Lina Meruane, however, expresses concern, questioning the condition of the diaspora and the possibility of a return to a country of which they never been able to form their own impressions; where they have never been able to imagine themselves: it would be nothing more than a “borrowed return, in the name of another”. The debut film by Andrés and Francisca Khamis Giacoman—a brother and sister, part of the large Palestinian diaspora in Chile—is established between these two narratives. While in Santiago the La Cisterna stadium prepares for the day’s match and the Baisanos arrive by bus to fill the stands, the collective momentum that is taking shape seems as much to instil a sense of belonging as to fuel a powerful drive: that of a community held together by images, stories and symbols which, like flags hoisted at the bow of a ship, billow in the wind of resistance.

Antoine Thirion