One-woman play about intrepid Gazan girl opens London Palestine Film Festival

Premiering this week at Barbican, Elias Matar's A Grain of Sand includes real-life testimonies and highlights the human cost of war

Sarah Agha will perform A Grain of Sand to open the two-week festival in London. Photo: Huzayfa Dawood

The voices of children from Gaza and ancient Palestinian tales will be part of a new one-woman show which premieres at London’s Barbican this week. Performed by actress Sarah Agha and written by Elias Matar, two British Palestinians based in London, A Grain Of Sand draws on real testimonials from Gaza and the magical world of Palestinian folk tales to highlight the human cost of the Israel-Gaza war, now in its second year.

Its premiere on Friday marks the launch of the London Palestine Film Festival – a two-week series of Palestinian films screened in cinemas across the city. The play tells the story of Renad, a little girl living in Gaza during the current war who searches for the phoenix – a mythical bird from Palestinian folk tales – so that it can help her find her parents. She recounts the folk tales that her grandmother taught her to get past the obstacles she encounters on the way, and to stay alive in her dangerous surroundings.

Some of Renad’s words and stories are taken from the poems and testimonies of children in Gaza, written in the first six months of the war and published in a booklet called A Million Kites. The challenges she comes across are taken from real events that have taken place in Gaza over the past year, widely shared on social media.

“Renad is talking from her point of view, but she's saying the real words of children,” Matar told The National. “We want to remember everyone or every single child whose heart was broken literally, or mentally.”

The blend of fact and fiction is important to Matar, who trained as a drama therapist and has used theatre in the past to help communities in the UK and Israel to overcome trauma. He is aware of his dual responsibility to shed light on the war's atrocities, but also to "take care" of an audience already feeling overwhelmed and isolated by these events.

Amid the uncertainty of the conflict, he chose to channel many stories of real people in Gaza into one fictional character. “The metaphor is a great holder of pain,” he said. “When we use the metaphor, we're reminding people that every child in Gaza still has hopes to survive.”

The character is inspired by Renad Atallah, a 10-year-old girl living in Gaza who makes viral social media videos of herself cooking Palestinian dishes in a refugee camp in Khan Younis. The Palestinian phoenix – which is also found in Lebanon – is a coastal bird that often appears in Palestinian folk talks about Gaza.

Part of Matar’s deep unease as he wrote the play was not knowing whether the children mentioned in the book were still alive or dead. It was an uncertainty that he hopes to convey in the performance.

“Some of them might still be alive, we don't know. Some of them will have been killed or starved to death,” he said. “We can't go back in time, we can't revive them, but we can remember them, and we could prevent this from happening again.”

Working with Agha over the past few months came from a position of despair, as both were involved in campaigning for Palestine in London. “I was feeling powerless, feeling the silence from people in power and government, let down by the international order,” he said. “I’m talking as a human first. I don't want to see this happening anywhere in the world, from any religion or any culture.”

Matar grew up in I’bilin, a Palestinian village in the Galilee. After setting up his own theatre company in his village, he moved to the UK to study in 2015. In his last major production, The Olive Jar (2023), for London’s Shubbak Festival, he worked with non-actors from the Arabic-speaking community in north-west London, getting them to tell their own stories of fleeing home and seeking refuge in the UK.

He worked closely with Agha on the script for A Grain of Sand. “We are almost writing together,” he said. “I'm coming to her place – how she's seeing stuff in here, things that stuck in her mind. We should think about the hope and take actions, or think about what we can do to put pressure on to end this war and what we can do to support children.”

Now a naturalised British citizen, Matar sees little hope for theatre and drama therapy like his own back home. “I tried,” he said. “When I lived there, I tried to focus on bridging gaps.”

Among his drama therapy projects was work with a Holocaust Museum in northern Israel that sought to bring Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel together to foster a deeper understanding of collective trauma and pain. “It became clear that much work is still needed for Israeli youth to fully understand Palestinian history," he said.

Alongside the play, the festival will host the premiere of From Ground Zero, an anthology of 22 short films from Gaza, made over the past year. In this series, Gazan filmmakers have documented their daily lives in the continuing conflict, telling previously untold stories. The project was led by director Rachid Masharawi, and will represent Palestine this year at the Oscars, despite having received no US distribution.

British Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi will speak about her film The Teacher, about a schoolteacher trying to protect his students from a life stifled by Israeli occupation.

The film festival’s director, Khaled Ziada, hopes this year's event will “create space of discussion,” for London audiences. “Each highlights stories of political realities as experienced by Palestinians, both at home and in the diaspora, through the creative lens of cinema,” he said.

The decision to open the film festival with Matar's play was based on the need to present "an experience where imagination is crucial to navigate the violence".