The Brussels-based Palestinian-Belgian filmmaker Michel Khleifi first returned to his birthplace to make the feature film Fertile Memory (1981). A few years later, he turned his camera on the original inhabitants of Ma'loul, a small village in Galilee that was destroyed by Israel after the 1948 war. Since 1948, countless Palestinian villages have been erased from the map. Ma'loul Celebrates its Destruction uses archival images of bombardments, destroyed buildings, and disfigured people to illustrate this. All that remains are ruins, bearing silent witness in the landscape. Ma'Loul, just west of Nazareth, is one such ruined village. It was inhabited principally by Palestinian Christians, who were forced to leave during the Nakba. Only once a year are residents allowed to revisit their old village, on Israeli Independence Day, also known as Nakba day. In Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction, Khleifi follows them on that day, revealing a world full of painful memories. A detailed painting still bears testimony to the existence of the village, which had seen Jewish, Roman, Ottoman, and Palestinian rulers come and go since ancient times. But Ma'Loul also lives on in the memories of its former ”now elderly ”inhabitants, who tell the story of exactly what happened. We get another perspective from a Palestinian school teacher, who explains to her young students why in the wake of World War II, the Jewish people had such an urgent need for their own nation, a place where they could feel safe. A strikingly mild assessment of the occupier, whom the teacher sees as a closely related brother people. An older man considers it unjustifiable that the Palestinians have become the indirect victims of the Nazi terror, in which they played no part whatsoever.