Watching Foragers (2022) in Singapore: Who’s the coloniser?

In his thoughtful review of Jumana Manna’s documentary Foragers (2022), Programmer Umar Al Khair examines Palestinian resistance and encourages readers to question what it means to inhibit the positions we occupy.

The National Gallery’s Painting With Light film festival is not the first time Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022) has been screened in Singapore, having first premiered at the 33rd Singapore International Film Festival in 2022. Compared to the full house it enjoyed at this year's screening, the audience was a lot more sparse then, a year before October 7th returned the world’s attention onto colonial violence which had never gone. Foragers reminds us of the almost eighty year war waged upon Palestine both as a people and as earth, but its reminder isn’t just one of time, but also of space. In the words of revolutionary author, Ghassan Kanafani, “wherever you strike it [colonialism], you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution…The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, (author’s emphasis) as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” And what Foragers presents is, uncomfortably, a lot more applicable than one might think to Singapore.

When I first watched Foragers in 2022, I instinctively identified with the Palestinians’ plucky but painfully real resistance against the occupation. Why wouldn’t I, or you? After all, we as Singaporeans often see ourselves as having decolonised ourselves from the British. But it connects to what is now for us a very distant part of our history. These days, we are a lot less concerned with decolonisation, and more interested in buying our way out of the climate crisis. 

Foragers, however, reveals that the latter cannot happen without the former.

Image taken from the New York Times

There are two cameras at work in Foragers. And as these two cameras interact and alternate through the film, they reveal the perspectives of both the indigenous and the coloniser.

The first is what Jumana describes, in a 2022 interview at MoMA, as the “foraging camera.” This camera is what forms the heart of Foragers. It stays close to the ground. Intimate, not just with the human characters of the film, but beautifully centering the flora and fauna of Palestine–we shall never forget Zeidan Hajib’s six dogs, Kushkou, Ma’moule, Kharoube, Fad’ara, Dunun & Akiko. The foraging camera’s centering of nature rather than humans reveals that Palestine–and the contest over it–is much larger than the people who inhabit it. The colonial project seeks control, and attempts to exercise power over nature itself. However hubristic that exercise may be.The coloniser's hubris rooted in their delusion that nature can be bent to colonial priorities, that it can be controlled. A hubris that the Palestinian foragers continually reveal – no matter the destruction it's subject to, nature heals and stubbornly finds a way to refuse colonial expansion. A hubris that even the Israeli farmer could not deny. 

The foraging camera’s other feature is its instability, its gaze endlessly moving, never fixed, often retreading the careful footsteps of the foragers or Zeidan’s dogs. On one hand, in depicting the Palestinians intimate and bodily movements through nature, it cements the tight bonds the Palestinians share with the land. On the other hand, it captures their insecurity at the hands of the occupation. Its frenetic movement directly follows the constant, violent displacement of the indigenous at the hands of the coloniser. This insecurity becomes even sharper when you compare it to the second camera, that of the coloniser’s.

Seeing Foragers a second time, I realised that both the opening and closing shots of Foragers pictured mesmerising seas of green, uncharacteristic of the foraging camera at the heart of the film. Neither shot is close to the ground nor unstable. They are inversely, fixed, top-down aerial shots of the earth. The movement in these shots is tightly controlled. But if the indigenous forager keeps his shaky eyes on the ground, whose gaze -- aptly symbolic of hierarchy -- are we seeing through?

Watching Foragers after October 7th provides a painful answer – we are seeing through the eyes of drones; every single video coming out of the Gaza strip since features the intentionally distressing sound of drones. But this has been the Palestinians’ lived realities a long time before October 7th. Aerial drones have always been integral to the occupation’s security apparatus -- the same apparatus the Palestinian foragers in the film have to contend with.

Far above in the sky, these shots render not just the Palestinians but the flora–the centre of the film–minuscule. You cannot comprehend the diverse beauty of Palestine’s nature through these shots. The expanse of green is reduced to another featureless background to be overlooked. In these shots it looks almost like golf course turf. The drone’s gaze is  conquering, for the  coloniser’s camera stands not just above Palestinians but the nature of Palestine itself and says, this all, is mine. The tightly controlled gaze of the coloniser’s camera reflects the rigid control of the occupation’s state power that you see first hand through the court scenes.

So as I sat in the cinema, looking down on nature–following the drone’s gaze, I thought  uncertainly to myself, was I laughing with the film and at the coloniser, or was I the one on trial? Afterall, in a city where most of us live in secure concrete high rises looking down on earth, how many of us actually share the intimate relationship with nature captured by the film’s foraging camera? In a city where that security is ensured by institutions that share an uncomfortable resemblance to the occupation rather than the indigenous. Foragers presents its Singaporean viewers with an important question–who is the coloniser?