A World Not Ours, film review: Poignant documentary about a traumatised community

(NC) Mahdi Fleifel, 93 mins

Mahdi Fleifel's poignant documentary about everyday life in Ain el-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, offers a very different insight to that given in news reports.

He spent his childhood in the camp and knows its inhabitants intimately. He feels huge nostalgia for the time he spent there watching World Cup matches with his friends.

Unlike them, he is free to leave. They are in exile, entrapped, still yearning for the homeland their families lost in 1948.

"The old will die and the young will forget," runs a notorious quote cited here about the plight of the refugees.

In his portrayal of a scarred and traumatised community, Fleifel demonstrates that this is absolutely not the case.