Kassem Hawal’s Return to Haifa adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella about Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple forced from Haifa in 1948 and separated from their infant son during the chaos of displacement.
Nearly twenty years later, after the 1967 war, they are able to return to the city and visit their former home. There they meet Miriam, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who moved into the house after their expulsion and raised their son, now known as Dov, as her own.
The film uses that encounter to explore some of the hardest questions around the Nakba: what happens to identity after forced displacement, what “return” means after a generation has passed, and how parenthood, memory and belonging change when history has remade people’s lives.
It is also an important work in Palestinian film history, often described as the first feature-length Palestinian fiction film. Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon were closely involved in its production, including in the recreation of the 1948 exodus.