A GRAY HARVEST BY FARAH BERROU 

On October 7th, 2023, I was in the South to document the olive harvest. It was a sad yield being an off year with lots of heat waves but dad decided we were going to harvest what we could. That afternoon, after news of Gaza began to fill the newsfeeds, I hopped in the car with my dad and his cousin to deliver the sacks of our family's olives to the local village press, located in a gas station warehouse.


There was very little natural light inside but I took a few photos with my (new) old Minolta anyway. I wanted to finish that first roll of film to see if the camera works. I'd taken so long to finish it that I'd forgotten I'd loaded it with a black & white roll. I developed it this September, after a few weeks in a hot car over the summer. It was a bit cooked.
I tried to salvage the 5 photos I captured that day. This photo is of the machine that washes the olives before they're pressed into oil. A beam from a skylight shines on the mountain of cleaned drupes.

With just a few weeks until the olive harvest usually begins, we have no access to our groves and no knowledge of the state they're in. All we've heard from neighbors is, "the trees look bad, they're covered in dust, they're gray." If there are any olives waiting for us, they probably look a lot like the ones in this photo.

Hopefully, this will all end and the October rain will wash away what Israel has done to our land but for Kfarkila, there will be no harvest this year.
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