Two films – Blown by the Wind (1971) directed by Armenian filmmaker Jacques Madvo and The Game (1973), directed by Iraqi filmmaker Qais Zubeidi – were among those included in the selection of films from the Tokyo Reels project by the Palestinian Collective Subversive Film shown for a run of 5 days in the contemporary art museum Artium, in the Basque city of Vitoria, in late April 2024, accompanied by the 2021 painting A Wider Kind of Love by British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi.

While Blown with the Wind used drawings by children to show the impact on forced displacement and refugee camp life for Palestinians, The Game offers an allegory of how childish ‘war games’ within zones of constant conflict are impacted by and turn into extensions of that conflict and its violence.

Bringing postcards of Dina Mattar’s painting – made within a refugee camp in Rafah, surrounded by children of her and others’ family, into the gallery space, I paused to reflect on how Basque children (like those depicted in a painting in the reading room, for adults and children) would visit the museum and momentarily reflect on the privilege of their protected lives at this moment of raw destruction and devastation for the children of Gaza.

The final scenes of ‘Blown by the Wind’ shows the drawing by an 11-year old refugee boy in the occupied Gaza strip, which he called ‘Peace is our aim for all’. The narration concludes:

“The children who are growing up in the refugee camps and who painted these pictures are no different from children anywhere else in the world, except for their plight and their suffering. They dream of a better world, for they have seen a worse one. The dreams and hopes of these youngsters’ paintings are our best hope for the future.”