PhD defence | Sven Augustijnen – Notes on Fierté nationale: De Jéricho vers Gaza

The object of study of this thesis is Fierté nationale: De Jéricho vers Gaza, a film that I shot in 2019 and completed in 2025, which follows Hassan Al Balawi—a Palestinian diplomat to Europe—as he returns to Palestine on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). 

Rather than beginning with a predefined research question, the thesis proceeds through an analysis that unfolds in the writing itself; it departs from a series of dreams that I had in relation to the film. In dialogue with the historical narratives constructed in other films shot in Palestine and Israel, and drawing on the microhistory method and Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, I analyse the entangled relationship between the European filmmaker and his subject, through which Al Balawi emerges neither as the romanticised figure of the freedom fighter nor as  the stereotype of the Palestinian “terrorist,” but as the representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA), caught between the revolutionary legacy of the PLO and the paradoxes of governance under occupation. A moderate voice, Al Balawi epitomises, perhaps tragically, an impossible position, torn between symbolic formations of national pride that both sustain and constrain him. 

The filmmaker himself is no less implicated, carrying a camera on his shoulder and driven, consciously or unconsciously, by the intertwined legacies of European guilt and the historical betrayal of Palestine. Ultimately, the thesis explores whether documentary cinema can reveal latent symbolic structures and historical configurations, and thereby become a tool for understanding the question of Palestine differently.

Supervisor: Professor Gertrud Sandqvist

Opponent: Professor Stefan Jonsson

Grading committee: Professor Cecilia Sjöholm, professor Magnus Bärtås, and dr Erika Larsson. 

Reserve: Professor Anna Houmann

Zoom: Link for online participation Access code: 358527

Profile in the research portal

Artistic presentation 18 September – 4 October at KHM2, Bergsgatan 29 (3rd floor), Malmö