Avant il n'y avait rien

What do you picture when you think of Palestine? What kind of sounds do you imagine? I’d wager that for many of us the rumbles and screams of Gaza are first in line, etched in our minds by the constant horrors that followed October 7, 2023. However, in his latest film Avant, il n’y avait rien, Yvann Yagchi presents us with a different side of the Palestinian reality – one marked by silence and tension, luxury hotels and barbed wire.

The documentary takes the form of an open letter from Yagchi, whose Palestinian family fled to Geneva in order to avoid persecution, to his childhood friend: an Israeli man adopted by a Swiss family. Originally, the two men were meant to actively collaborate on the creation of the film, but when Yagchi’s and his friend’s perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proved irreconcilable, the latter had to be scribbled out of all their footage and Yagchi was faced with a dilemma. Caught between his affection for his friend and the suffering of his people, Yagchi must come to terms with everything that the conflict stole from him, from his connection to his ancestors’ history to his friendship with the man he once considered one of his closest friends.

The film is striking in its eagerness to obtain answers, to get closer to the “truth”, as Yagchi’s technician puts it in one of the interviews. Yagchi gives a voice to an array of different perspectives on the situation, from his mother who has never visited her homeland to a Rabbi that invokes his religion to justify the Israeli occupation, without forgetting the Palestinian construction workers who spend their days building Israeli homes on what used to be their land. Behind this quest to collect a variety of testimony, lurks a burning desire on Yagchi’s part to “be heard”, marked by the personal frustration of his ruined friendship and, by extension, the silencing of the Palestinian people.

The cultural and geographical palimpsest that Yagchi’s friend is actively contributing to is presented as an oppressive but mostly quiet type of violence. In the colonies, people go about their day, children play with their families, modern homes and hotels are constantly being built. Only the presence of firearms and barbed wire seem to betray that something is amiss – that this superficial normalcy is built on stolen land where “before, there was nothing”.

In spite of his removal from the project, the presence of Yagchi’s friend haunts the film, both through Yagchi’s addresses and through his scribbled out figure, which appears sporadically as Yagchi pursues his quest for answers. His inflexible position is cold in its violence – a betrayal heightened by his refusal to acknowledge the suffering of the local Palestinians, turned into refugees on their own land.

The film ends as it started, with an address to his old friend, which he extends to the audience, asking for humanity and action. Avant, il n’y avait rien is poignant in its sharp gaze and determined quest for understanding. It is powerful in its attempt to assert the existence of the Palestinian past, and to resist an erasure that comes at the cost of human lives and of a people’s culture.