In drawing a filmic portrait of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich, Simone Bitton and Elias Sanbar considered two elements, namely, as Darwich reminds them, that the Arabic word for home, bayt, is also the word for verse. In other words, poems inhabit their listeners and forge belonging. The second element was Darwich’s inimitable rhythm, the cadence of his words and metaphors. The film is more than a biographical portrait, it is an invitation to a travel inside the poet’s universe, the modern, allegorical Andalusia he imagined, humanistic, irreverent and erotic.

Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955, she lives between Paris, Rabat and Jerusalem. She has directed more than twenty films and documentary series for cinema and television. Bitton’s practice has been very versatile, ranging from archival montage, poetic essay films, intimate portraits of artists, or investigative documentary, but her political engagement with the history, culture and present-day reality of the Middle East and North African regions is salient. The series she directed, Les grandes vois de la Chanson Arabe (1990), and the two-episode films Palestine, the story of a Land (1993) are reference works that have been broadcast several times and distributed in several countries, more than 20 years after their release. The Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) received several awards and were released in theaters in several countries. Bitton teaches at the University Paris 8, and is a member of the Ateliers Varan.