"LYD" Film Screening and Q&A with Co-Director Rami Younis

Join the Arab American Cultural Center for a community screening of Lyd, a Sci Fi Documentary: A story of a city that once connected Palestine to the world – what it once was, what it is now, and what it could have become.

Following the film screening, Lyd co-director Rami Younis will join in person for a Q&A session.

Lyd in Exile is a feature-length, sci-fi documentary that shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the viewer is guided through the lifespan of a five-thousand-year-old city and its residents. Lyd was once a thriving Palestinian city with a rich history. In 636AD, It was even considered the first capital of Palestine. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. Today, the city has a Jewish Israeli majority and a Palestinian minority and is disinvested and divided by racism and violence. For Palestinians, Lyd’s story is a painful and tragic fall from grace, which is why our film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

About the Director and Producer Rami Younis:

A Palestinian filmmaker, Rami Younis is a writer and journalist from Lyd. He is a former Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. He was as a main contributor to the online magazine +972 and served as editor and a member of the founding collective of its Hebrew sister site, “local call”, a journalistic project designed to challenge Israeli mainstream journalism outlets. Rami is also co-founder and manager of the first ever “Palestine Music Expo”, an event that connects the local Palestinian music scene to the world wide industry. Rami was also the first ever host and founder of the Arabic-language daily critical news show, “On the Other Hand” – which called out figures in power positions and debunked fake news spread by them.

https://lydinexile.com