About Liwan

“Liwan” is a documentary about the cultural space of the same name in Nazareth. Producer and Director Doris Hakim first met the founders of Liwan – Sami Jabali, Sally Azzam and Silke Wanner – back in 2016, when an exhibition she was to put on in Nazareth was banned. They came out to support her, and she immediately fell in love with them and with Liwan.

Opening and running Liwan has been a constant struggle for its founders. The space has been attacked in the past, and they were threatened constantly.

An Israeli government “redevelopment” project in the late 1990s shut down most businesses in the souq for many years. After the market reopened, it had lost much of its life. Liwan triggered other new cultural spaces to open and create a type of cultural resistance movement that focussed on the Palestinian identity that was denied them by the State of Israel.  

In addition, Liwan’s activities promote political tourism, where visitors actually engage with the local Palestinian Arab population, and more specifically political tours led by a local journalist, Jonathan Cook, around Nazareth and nearby destroyed Palestinian villages. 

Palestinians are a minority inside the state of Israel, and their culture has been deliberately and systematically marginalised by the Israeli state. Consequently, another major goal for Liwan is to support and promote local Palestinian culture, selling Palestinian products, by hosting concerts by local Palestinian musicians, poetry readings, art exhibitions, showings of films, and acting as a meeting point for tours visiting Palestinian heritage.

Doris Hakim

Adam Newby