American-born teen, Rima the Lost One, unites with her great-grandmother, also named Rima, on a time-travel journey to 1930s Palestine. After clashing with her modern-ish Mom on vacation, Rima the Lost One finds herself warped through a portal that takes her to the present of her ancestors. Rima the Lost One must navigate her ancestral homeland, a place she’s never known. She desperately looks for a way home, aka the present, the place she originally desired to escape from.

Director Biography - Reem Jubran

Reem Jubran is a filmmaker and visual artist based between Southern California and Palestine. Her photography and cinematic work explores identity, memory, and freedom. She completed several short film projects while achieving her B.A. in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and continued her film education in Palestine, where she worked as Assistant Director on Palestinian narrative feature films. Today, she holds an MFA in Directing from University of California, Los Angeles. Her thesis film, Don’t Be Long, Little Bird is her first international project and co-production between her university and production in Palestine. Reem’s story and the making of this film is featured in the PBS Artbound Series documentary episode called LA Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement, where she represents a continuation of the legacy and solidarity between black, brown, and indigenous filmmakers at UCLA. 

Most recently, her latest short Don’t Be Long, Little Bird has been awarded the Gothams Student Showcase Award, sponsored by Focus Features. The story behind making Don’t Be Long, Little Bird was featured in an Emmy award-winning PBS one-hour documentary called, LA Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement, a documentary that featured Reem’s work as a continuation of the legacy of the ethnic film students that emerged during the LA Rebellion.

Director Statement

I wrote this movie asking myself a few questions. If I could meet my grandmother again, what would I say? What would I ask her first? Would we be friends? 

There are so many things I wish I could tell my grandmother today. This film allowed me to speak to her in many ways. 

It’s bringing to eternal life two things: the feelings I had when I first went to Palestine. And those feelings are how I wrote this film. While imagining talking to my grandmother again, in the form of meeting her when she was my age. 

It is also about truth. In a world full of victimhood complexities, where what used to be real has been deformed into polished and deodorized manipulative skits, the truth is often difficult to find.  You are probably wondering, how does one find truth in a film that involves time travel and fictional depiction of a time that no longer exists? The answer to that is, truth can be found in the method of filmmaking, not within the story itself. 

This film is built off of truth and rich history. Behind this film are piles of personal stories, family histories, settler-colonial history, and folkloric Palestinian oral stories that existed pre-1948.  As part of the diaspora, grandparents and elders serve as a direct line to Palestine. With that generation disappearing, a new, stronger connection is being developed. Behind that connection exists a flourishing fusion of oral histories, family relics, embroidery, epigenetics, and traditions, essentially everything behind an indigenous existence that is adapting to its modern surroundings. 

This film is an embodiment of the regeneration that is occurring presently to Palestinians in the diaspora. Theoretically, it fuses the past with the present, which dictates the future. Physically, and in a nonfiction sense, the making of this film required five young Palestinian women of the diaspora to return to their homeland, including myself. My great-grandmother’s headdress (Oqay) was worn by the character playing the great-grandmother. This process felt reflexive, as if we all stepped into the role of “The Lost One” while making this film. 

Another important element of the diaspora’s rebirth is identifying that Palestinian women, historically and presently, are not victims. The “The Little Bird” is the title of a Palestinian folktale from the published collection “Speak Bird, Speak Again” by scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana. The tales are collected from a group of seventeen tellers, all householders and majority housewives who can neither read nor write. Palestinian folktale is primarily a woman’s art, and women at that time provided a large measure of creative artistic energy. The story of “The Little Bird” depicts courtship and female sexuality through the metaphorical body of a bird, who while being hunted and shot down (courted by a man) is where the procreative power of her being, her creativity and playfulness, is found from within. 

As the folk-tellers of Palestine say,

This is my tale, I’ve told it, and in your hands I leave it.

https://www.dontbelonglittlebird.com/