Celebrating Mahmoud Darwish: Poetry, Exile and Memory on Screen

The Institut français de Jordanie joins an international tribute to Mahmoud Darwish with a special screening of Simone Bitton’s documentary Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land Is the Language, on Sunday 27 September at the Shoman Foundation.

Few poets have transformed the experience of land, exile and memory into language as powerfully as Mahmoud Darwish. One of the most influential voices of contemporary Arab poetry, Darwish created a body of work in which the personal and the collective constantly meet - poems of belonging and absence, love and loss, identity and remembrance.

From 25 to 27 September, the Institut du monde arabe and the Centre Pompidou are paying tribute to Mahmoud Darwish through an international initiative bringing together cultural institutions and French institutes in several countries. The Institut français de Jordanie is taking part in this celebration with a special film screening in Amman.

At the heart of the programme is Simone Bitton’s documentary Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land Is the Language (Mahmoud Darwich : et la terre, comme la langue).

Made in 1997, the film follows Darwish through the places that shaped his life and writing, tracing a journey marked by movement and exile, from Haifa to Cyprus, Tunis, Amman, Paris, Cairo and Ramallah. Rather than approaching him through outside commentary, the documentary allows Darwish’s own voice, words and poetry to guide the viewer through his story.

Through archival material, conversations, poetry readings and images of the landscapes and cities connected to his life, the film reveals how land, exile and memory gradually became a language of their own in Darwish’s work.

The documentary also captures something essential about his legacy: poetry not only as a written art, but as a living, spoken experience. Darwish’s readings drew large audiences across the Arab world and beyond, giving his poetry a resonance that moved between individual experience and collective memory.

The title itself evokes one of the film’s central ideas. In Arabic, the word “bayt” can mean both a house and a line of poetry - an image that resonates deeply with Darwish’s writing, where language becomes a place of belonging when geography, home and identity are unsettled. This idea was explicitly identified by Simone Bitton and Elias Sanbar as central to the conception of the film.

More than a portrait of a celebrated poet, As the Land Is the Language offers an opportunity to encounter Mahmoud Darwish through his own words and to rediscover a literary voice whose poetry continues to speak across languages, generations and borders.

Screening information

• Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land Is the Language

• Documentary by Simone BittonSunday, 27 September 2026 — 9:00 AM

• Shoman Foundation

• Free admission

The screening is organised as part of the international Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day initiative led by the Institut du monde arabe and the Centre Pompidou, with the participation of the Institut français de Jordanie and partner cultural institutions.

Join us for a morning of cinema and poetry celebrating the life, words and enduring literary legacy of Mahmoud Darwish.