Actress Sarah Agha retraces her connection to 'The Holy Land' and unpacks her love for Arab films

Sarah Agha, The Holy Land and Us, BBC. Copyright © Tom Hayward, 2023.

Words by Fatima Aamir.

Born and raised in London, Irish-Palestinian actress, writer and film curator Sarah Agha had few Arab friends growing up. Her father was born in the village of Del Hamiya but fled to Jordan when his family was forcibly displaced during the nakba in 1948. "They always thought they would be back," Sarah tells me, "so they took enough, but left behind a lot." It's been decades, and they've never been able to return. Sarah's father moved to the Golan Heights when he was 8, where he lived until he was forced to flee again in 1967 following the Third Arab-Israeli war. He settled in London in his early 20s, but made sure to keep Sarah rooted in the Palestinian community.

Faced with generational and linguistic barriers, Sarah grew up feeling unable to access her own culture in quite the same manner he did. Years later, she founded the Arab Film Club, which eventually helped her connect with a spirited new generation of Palestinians over their shared love for cinema.

"[The club] started because a friend of mine–she's Syrian, raised in Scotland–we were talking about how we're sick of playing refugees all the time." Once Sarah's professional acting career took off, she was thrilled to be offered more auditions, but disappointed at how patronizing and two-dimensional many of those roles felt. Written largely by non-Arabs, the roles confined talented Arab actors to little more than political caricatures of their own culture. "My heart sinks each time I see "Palestinian terrorist" as an audition. It's happened to me with a TV show more than once. There's never any nuance."

In their search for more complex characters, Sarah and her friends began to read plays by Arab writers. The first reading the group did together was a stage adaptation of "Returning to Haifa" by acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. From there, they delved into a 1920s Egyptian tragicomedy by Tawfiq Al-Hakim, a political text by Syria's renowned Muhammad Al-Maghut, and then into contemporary plays by Arab writers of the diaspora, including Hannah Khalil, Hassan Abdulrazzak and Yussef El Guindi. What started off as a small reading group soon grew into a regular monthly film club with over 75 active members.

The first film they watched was The Silences of the Palaces (1994) by Tunisian Moufida Tlatli, who also happened to be the first Arab woman to direct a feature film. "It was phenomenal," Sarah tells me. "It's such a shame films like that don't have wider distribution. It's been really important for us as a community to try and uncover them."

This community-driven approach has been a striking success, with film club members bringing their diverse knowledge to the group and introducing each other to films they would have never encountered otherwise. Many of these films, Sarah notes, are directed by Arab women. These include Lebanon's Nadine Labaki, who directed Caramel (2007) and the Oscar-nominated Capernaum (2018); Anne-Marie Jacir from Nazareth who directed Wajib (2017); and Palestinian Farah Nabulsi, who recently won a BAFTA for her short film The Present (2019). To date, the film club has explored films from Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and more. On May 18, the club is organizing an in-person screening of the Palestinian film Farha at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, followed by a Q&A with the director Darin J. Sallam.

Sarah Agha, ‘The Holy Land and Us’, Courtesy of the BBC, 2023.

In co-presenting "The Holy Land and Us," Sarah had the privilege of delving deeper into her own family history. The BBC production team provided the resources to facilitate research, access various institutional bodies, and retrieve photographs. "My Bedouin family, they weren't taking photographs at the time [of the nakba]. The documentary proves that we were there, when our existence is denied daily by so many different people. It's very hard to defend it when you don't have tangible evidence. It's like the most violent form of gaslighting."

Even with tangible evidence like photographs or video footage, Palestinians often find their rich oral histories and lived experiences dismissed in favour of Israel's state-sanctioned historical narratives. "The BBC has an ‘impartiality’ obligation, and that's why sharing the platform was hard," Sarah admits, disappointed that audiences would be reluctant to listen to Palestinian stories on their own merit. "The sad reality is that less people would have watched that–I mean, we would have watched it–but the mainstream masses might not have. With this documentary, we will reach even Zionists, or people who would otherwise never choose to listen to Palestinian stories on their own."

Sarah wonders if the audience would have been so amenable to the project prior to the palpable shift in public discourse around Israel-Palestine in May 2021, when global protests erupted around Israel's escalation of settler colonial violence. That being said, she is careful not to paint the documentary as a breakthrough, and hopes to see more media production from the unequivocal perspective of Palestinians: "most Palestinians are intelligent enough to know that there's only so much you can do through [the mainstream media]."

Agreeing to the project required a leap of faith. "Because our representation is either very poor or very scarce, when there is an opportunity to represent, it's hard not to feel the pressure to do it." But Sarah is nervous about being seen as a spokesperson for Palestinians. "I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to Arab characters–there's a lot of pressure to get it right. That pressure's never on European writers, but if a character has flaws and they're Arab, we feel like we've let ourselves down. And this comes up again and again with the Arab film club as well–we're so disappointed by Western representation, when we're finally able to start writing our own stories, we feel like we have to make these perfect characters."

Sarah believes in the value of art that opens our hearts and minds to vulnerable and messy characters. Her sentiments echo Palestinian poet Mohammed El Kurd in a recent interview with GQ Middle East, where he admits, "Palestinians are not flawless. But that doesn't mean we don't deserve liberty and freedom."

Follow Sarah Agha’s work here.