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The two-minute “taster” of our in-production documentary film – working title “Aisha’s Story” – provides insight into the central role of cuisine in keeping culture alive in exile. As Aisha says at the end of the clip, “Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage.”

Cinematographer: Guochen Wang. Documentary directors: Elizabeth Vibert, Guochon Wang, Salam Guenette. Project Director: Elizabeth Vibert, Department of History.

Aisha Azzam and her family-run grain mill in Baqa’a refugee camp, Jordan, are community partners in the UVic-based, transnational research project we call Four Stories About Food Sovereignty. I met Aisha in 2018, when I was invited to Jordan to screen a documentary about South African farmers at the UN Women Film Festival. Visiting food security and food justice projects in northern Jordan, many of them run by Palestinian and Syrian refugees, it became very apparent how crucial food culture is to cultural continuity and resurgence – not least for communities dispossessed of their homelands. Refugee stories became part of the storytelling that our oral history and filmmaking project seeks to facilitate. In addition to Palestinians in Jordan, the Four Stories Project (“four” speaks to continents rather than the number of stories) works with Indigenous communities on Vancouver Island and in Colombia; African farming communities in South Africa; and others to examine the impacts of historical dispossession and ongoing colonialism on food systems, and to explore efforts by communities today to regenerate and reassert those food systems. Such knowledge and efforts, which prioritize crops and methods adapted across generations to challenging local conditions, are essential in the era of climate crisis.

The Four Stories Project engages researchers from Canada, the US, Colombia, South Africa, and Jordan and community partners with whom they have been carrying out research for many years. The “taster” from the film about Aisha’s mill is the work of a team that includes Aisha and her family, Palestinian youth we trained pre-pandemic in digital storytelling methods, a Chinese cinematographer, Palestinian musicians, Jordanian researchers, Canadian student interns and research assistants, and a Palestinian-Canadian assistant director. Research is supported by the University of Victoria and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

— Elizabeth Vibert

Project Director: Elizabeth Vibert, Department of History
Cinematographer: Guochen Wang
Documentary directors: Elizabeth Vibert, Guochen Wang, Salam Guenette
www.fourstoriesaboutfood.org/
Recent project publication (open access): canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/531

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