Subtitled
Chronicle of a Present Absentee, this humorous, heartbreaking film
is shot largely in homes and places in which Suleiman’s family, who
are Palestinian citizens of Israel, once lived. Inspired by his father’s
diaries, letters his mother sent to family members who had fled the
Israeli occupation, and the director’s own recollections, the film spans
from 1948 until the present, recounting the saga of Suleiman’s family in
four elegantly stylized episodes.
Suleiman himself
plays a silent, impassive observer through a series of surreal, blackly
comic episodes from his family’s history in Nazareth that show how
people learn to live in the face of death, dispossession, and
destruction. Each generation has found its own strategy of resistance (Suleiman’s
is deadpan ridicule). Despite everything, he has found his own
particular way to do something meaningful with “the time that remains.”
“…a cool, controlled
minor masterpiece”
Philip French, The Observer
• Co-presented with: Consulate General of France in Boston
• Sponsored by: Northeastern University’s Program in Cinema Studies, the
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and the Middle East
Center for Peace, Culture & Development.
• Winner:
Asia Pacific Screen Awards – awarded the Jury Grand Prize, 2010
Rotterdam International Film Festival , 2009 Argentinean Film
Critics Association , awarded the Critics Prize “Because of his artistic
mastery and the magnificent approach with which he exhibits, from a
personal point of view, his own people’s history and pain. ” Official
selection 2009 Cannes Film Festival , 2009 London Film Festival
Tickets ::
Through MFA only
- tickets will
not
be sold at the door of the reception hall:: MFA
general admission $20,
members, seniors, and students $15.
Wajeh the coffee-seller is a central figure in the lives of thousands of
people who must pass through the checkpoint everyday, starting before
dawn.
This film was made as part of the
project: "Coffee – Between
Reality and Imagination" - a
cinematic collaboration between young Israeli andPalestinian filmmakers at Tel Aviv university.
• Winner:
Guam
International Film Festival 2011Grand Jury Award Nominee, Best Short
Documentary. Official selection 9th San Sebastian Human Rights
Film Festival
The
Story of Milk and Honey
plays with sound, text, image, and absence of image, when a filmmaker
attempting to write a love story set in the Middle East is sidetracked
by his obsession with history and memory. Through voice-over narration
of what ensues, the video details repeated failed attempts to
distinguish the political body from the subjective experience. The
unnamed individual, lost in his research, ultimately confuses love for
patriotism.
In
July 2002, French illustrator Daniel Maja is invited to Ramallah and
Gaza to develop a project for art schools in Palestine, despite the fact
that most West Bank cities are under curfew. Filmmaker Dominique Dubosc
(Palestine In Fragments; Palestine, Palestine) decides to
accompany him. His film develops as a series of visual and symbolic
interactions between the two artists’ perspectives, which play with one
another, in two mediums, throughout the journey. In this experimental
video essay, Dubosc conveys both the horrors of the reality perceived,
and the complexities and limitations of conveying what is perceived in
the visual medium.
In a series of witty
vignettes, some contemplative, others laden with satiric humor and
critique, Elia Suleiman expresses his emotions and state of mind as he
observes daily life in Palestine. With characteristic dry wit and an eye
for the absurd at the heart of the mundane, Chronicle of a Disappearance
is a thoughtful, politically nuanced treatment of the routines, rituals,
ceremonies, and accidents that punctuate the life of ‘E.S.' (played by
Elia Suleiman himself) on his return home from abroad to Palestine. For
Suleiman, the film represents ‘a journey in search of what it means to
be Palestinian… a combination of possible truths, transgressing genres
and blending fact with fiction to explore the intertwined boundaries of
storytelling, history and autobiography.'
• Sponsored by: Northeastern University’s Program in Cinema Studies, the
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and the Middle East
Center for Peace, Culture & Development.
• Winner: Luigi
De Laurentiis Prize, Best First Feature Film, Venice Film Festival 1996
This film is part of the
The Gift of a Music
Education: Celebrating the Legacy of Edward Said event, see
here for details
Knowledge is the Beginning chronicles the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO), established in 1999 by Edward Said
and Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, whose aim was to bring together
young musicians from Israel, Palestine, and various Arab countries,
supported by Spanish musicians, so that they could get to know each
other in a neutral, free space through the shared language of music. The
WEDO opened up channels of communication based on equality, cooperation,
and justice for all.
The film traces the orchestra’s history from its founding through its
historic live concert in Ramallah’s Cultural Palace in the occupied West
Bank in 2005. The West-Eastern Divan, a name derived from a collection
of poems by Goethe, is not only a music project, but also a model of
democracy and civilized living. Edward Said called it the most important
thing he had done in his life.
• Winner:
FIPA D'OR Grand Prize 2007 (Peforming
Arts), International Emmy Award 2006 (Arts Programming), DOCFEST Palermo
2007 (Award for the Doc of highest cultural Value),
Basel-Karlsruhe-Forum 2007 (The Youth Jury Prize), San Diego Jewish Film
Festival 2007 (Audience Award for Best Doc), Banff World Television
Festival 2007 (Best Arts Documentary), Rodos Ecofilms Festival 2007
(Audience Award), Rincón International Film Festival 2008, Puerto Rico
(Best Int. Doc)
This event offers the community
an opportunity to honor:
The late Edward Said's legacy
of making making a musical education possible for Palestinian
youth, with the broader visionary mission of "promoting
interaction and coexistence among cultures through music"
The ongoing extraordinary
efforts of Berklee College of Music,
building on Said's legacy, to collaborate with the Edward Said
National Music Conservatory in Ramallah to scout and recruit
musically gifted Palestinian youth and facilitate their study at
Berklee
The achievements of the
remarkable group of Palestinian students now enrolled at
Berklee
The generous support of
members of our community in bringing the first two
Palestinian students to Berklee College of music
Speakers:
Roger Brown, President of Berklee,Adel Iskandar,
Co-Editor,
Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and
Representation (2010)
• Co-presented with: Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and
Development, Northeastern University ,International Affairs Program, Northeastern
University, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Massachusetts (ADCMA),
Musicians Without Borders
Born into a Palestinian family in Jerusalem in 1935, in 1948 Edward Said
and his family were dispossessed and forced to relocate to Cairo.
Educated in the US, he eventually settled in New York and went on to
become a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University and one of the most important literary critics of the late
20th century. For many years, he was also the most prominent
spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the US.
Said was diagnosed with incurable leukemia in 1991, and struggled with
the disease over a decade, while continuing to work. Towards the end of
his life, he stopped giving interviews. However, in September 2003, less
than a year before his death, he agreed to speak at length with the
filmmakers about his illness, his work, Palestine and politics, his life
and education, and his continuing preoccupations. This film is an honest
and enthralling tribute to a man who defied categorization and
inexorably fought for truth and justice.
..........................................................................................................................................................................
Sunday, October 23
In spring 2002, the
Israeli army laid siege to the Balata refugee camp and invaded the Jenin
refugee camp. Over a two-week period, the lives of Palestinians facing
siege, destruction, and death were documented on camera. Two years
later, a group of young Israeli ex-soldiers and officers held a photo
exhibition in Tel Aviv entitled “Breaking the Silence.” With
photographs and video testimony from 60 soldiers, the exhibition caused
an uproar in Israel. Placed in positions of
absolute authority, the soldiers shared, they had increasingly lost
their sense of humanity, ethics, and morality. Seeking to regain their
own humanity, they decided to speak out.
The film
features members of
Breaking the Silence(Shovrim Shtika) Yehuda Shaul, Avichay Sharon, Dotan Greenvald,
and Noam Chayut, their families, and Palestinian refugees.
• Winner:Waseda
Journalism Award in Memory of Ishibashi Tanzan for public contribution
in Japan, 2009 Japanese Film Pen Club Award
..........................................................................................................................................................................
Sunday, October 23
Athens, 1983. The press reports that four-year old Bashir is killed
during the assassination of his father, a top PLO lieutenant. A tragedy,
yet what if Bashir's death was not the end of his journey? In this
experimental, highly original, and occasionally surreal film, Mahmoud al
Massad redefines what a documentary can be, with fascinating results. Al
Massad’s bold stylistic approach stretches the limits of established
documentary making to tell a very personal story, the reality of which
is far stranger than fiction.
• Winner:
First
Prize, Muhr Arab Documentary First Prize, Dubai International Film Festival 2010,
2011 Audience Award Arabisches Film festival in Tübingen, Germany.
Official selection, 2011 Hot Docs International Film Festival
Packed with witty visual gags, comic vignettes, and moments of
spectacular fantasy, the award-winning Divine Intervention
(subtitled A Chronicle of Love and Pain) is a portrait of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict laced with wicked and subversive humor.
Suleiman again plays the central character himself: “E.S.” cares for his
ailing father in Jerusalem whilst conducting an affair with a
Palestinian woman living in Ramallah (Manal Khader). Barred from moving
between the two cities, the lovers are forced to share their intimate
moments in the shadow of an Israeli army checkpoint, from whence they
observe the daily feuds between the troops and civilians. Recalling the
comic genius of Jacques Tati and deadpan delivery of Buster Keaton,
Suleiman's film is a passionate and surreal depiction of the political
and human situation in Palestine.
• Sponsored by: Northeastern University’s Program in Cinema Studies, the
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and the Middle East
Center for Peace, Culture & Development.
• Winner:Grand Jury Prize, Cannes
Film Festival, 2002, Fipresci Prize, Cannes
Film Festival, 2002
A video interpretation of the poem
Into Egypt,
written and performed by
Suheir Hammad.
“Suheir’s work resonates on so many levels for me, allowing a lot of
room for my imagination to wander conceptually,” Waleed says. “The poem
is a snapshot of an intense moment in human history. It’s a metaphor for
transformation. It’s a spell to dismantle mechanisms of fear. It’s an
oracle. It’s the blues.
This is the story of the struggle for democracy in Egypt that led to the
historic uprising in January-February 2011. Filmed on the ground in
Egypt over the preceding 14 months, this story is told through the eyes
of Egypt’s youth activists, labor movements, and political opposition
figures. It is an account of their struggle against extraordinary odds
to remove an uncompromising US-backed authoritarian regime determined to
stay in power.
Going beyond the headlines, this documentary offers the background story
of years of mounting political resentment against the ruling regime. The
film follows the efforts of democracy activists and the political
opposition as they organized and expressed themselves in increasingly
outspoken ways, even at great personal risk.
We are Egypt
explains why the peaceful revolution that began on January 25, 2011
occurred.
Just a few of the myriad voices featured in this film:
Kamal Abu Eita – Leader of the Real Estate Tax Authority Union
| Moshira
Ahmed – High Council for Al Ghad Party |Ashraf Balba –
Activist in the reform faction of the historic opposition Wafd party
|Mustapha Basyouni
– Journalist and labor activist |
Muhammad
Beltagi – Prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood
|
Saad Ed-Din Ibrahim
– Professor of Sociology at American University in Cairo and
prominent democracy activist
|Ali Eldin
Hilal – Lead spokesperson for the formerly ruling National
Democratic Party (NDP) |Gamal Eid
– Human rights lawyer and director of the Arabic Network for Human
Rights Information |Hisham Foad
– Journalist for the Arabi Nassrist Party weekly |George Ishak – Founding member of Kifaya (“Enough”)
democracy movement | Gamila
Ismail – Prominent democracy activist and politician
|Buseina Kemmel
– Prominent activist, resigned as news anchor for Egyptian State TV
|Ahmed
Meher – Leader of the April 6 Youth Movement |Ayman Nour
– Former political prisoner and presidential candidate in 2005 and
leader of the Al Ghad opposition party |Nawal
Saadawi – Prominent Egyptian author, feminist intellectual and
political activist
| Omar Sharif
– Prominent Egyptian Hollywood actor
|Shedy Taha
– High Council for Al Ghad Party |Abdel Rahman
Yousif - Poet and organizer for the Mohammed Al Baradei Campaign
• Co-presented with: Northeast Regional Office, Amnesty
International USA Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine The Harvard
Law School Middle East Law Students' Association
A first-hand
report from Gaza’s waters of how Israel has forcefully placed fishing
literally out of reach for Gazans, even in the so-called “permitted”
fishing zone three miles off the coast.
Cultures of Resistance interviews the Katibe 5, a Palestinian hip-hop group formed in the Burj al-Barajneh
refugee camp in Lebanon, on their efforts to carve out a space of
resistance in a place where "a microphone...is better than the
Kalashnikov."
Advisory:
Contains graphic images that some viewers could find disturbing.
Cultures of Resistance highlights
the work of artists, musicians, and dancers in some of the most
conflict-ridden places in the world who are committing their creativity
to overcoming violence and injustice. From Iran, where graffiti and rap
became tools in fighting government repression, to Burma, where monks
acting in the tradition of Gandhi take on a dictatorship, to Brazil,
where musicians reach out to slum kids and transform guns into guitars,
and to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where photography, music,
and film have given a voice to those rarely heard, CULTURES OF
RESISTANCE explores how art and creativity can be ammunition in the
battle for peace and justice across the globe.
Featuring: Medellin Poets for
Peace, Capoeira Masters from Brazil, Niger Delta Militants, Iranian
Graffiti Artists, Women's Movement Leaders in Rwanda, Lebanon's refugee
filmmakers, US Political Pranksters, Kayapó Activists from the Xingu
River, Israeli Dissidents, Hip Hop Artists from Palestine, Saffron
Revolution Burmese Monks.
• Co-presented with: Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine The
Harvard Law School Middle East Law Students' Association
• Winner: Ethiopia,Addis Ababa, Audience Award, Addis International Film Festival, USA/CA, Best Documentary, Tiburon International Film Festival, INDIA/JAIPUR,
Green Rose Award, Jaipur International Film Festival , BENIN/ OUIDAH,
Python Audience Prize, Jury Special Mentions, Ouidah International Film
Festival, UKRAINE/ KIEV, Best Documentary on Human Rights, Steps
International Film Festival
My Land gives voice to Palestinian
refugees who have lived in camps in Lebanon for over 60 years after
being exiled from their homeland in 1948. Their stories are then shared,
via video, with young Israeli Jews who are building their country and
feel firmly attached to their land. The result: an otherwise impossible
conversation, which stirs deep emotions.
• Co-presented with: Harvard Law
School Justice for Palestine The Harvard Law School Middle East Law
Students' Association
• Winner: Music and Editing,
National Festival of Film, Tangier, Morocco
..........................................................................................................................................................................
Tuesday, October 25
When a ceasefire
was declared after Israel’s recent war on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead,
December 2008-January 2009), the directors entered the Gaza Strip
immediately and documented, together with the Palestinian Human Rights
Centre, the extent of the "Gaza-strophe."
•
Co-presented with: Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine The
Harvard Law School Middle East Law Students' Association
• Winner:
Best Film, 12th International Documentary Festival of
Thessaloniki, Greece, Best Documentary, 9th International “Al Ard" Doc
Film Festival, Cagliari, Sardinia
A group of
Palestinian day laborers from outside Jerusalem face a nighttime journey
of high walls, rope-climbing, barbed wire fences, fear of arrest, and
even mortal threat to cross the Separation Wall in pursuit of a daily
subsistence wage in a Jewish settlement inside the city.
Nine to Five
is a part of the Jerusalem Moments 2009 Project: Seven
documentary short films by seven young directors, Palestinian and
Israeli, reflecting the complexity of life in Jerusalem, in the context
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Winner:
The
7th International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (Kiev,
Ukraine), Award from Human Rights Competition Jury
This documentary short features oral
history testimonies of two Palestinians who were “internally displaced”
in 1948 from the al-Manshiyya quarter in the northeastern sector of the
Palestinian city of Yaffa (Jaffa), which was the largest urban center in
pre-1948 Palestine.
Founded in the 1830s, by 1944, al-Manshiyya
had grown to about 13,000 residents, of whom around 1,000 were Jewish
and the rest Arab. Al-Manshiyya’s location – between Jaffa center to its
south and Tel Aviv to its north – made it a target for an ethnic
cleansing operation from April 25 to 29, 1948 by the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL),
and a subsequent Israeli government decision to destroy the entire
quarter in September 1948. Today, the only surviving structure is the
Hasan Bek mosque; the rest of the quarter has been turned into a
promenade.
For years, Haaretz journalist
Gideon Levy has tried to convey the horrific reality in the occupied
territories to Israeli readers, with mixed results. A playwright adapts
his work to bring it more directly to live Israeli audiences, who now
encounter the not-so-distant reality.
The close-knit Hamouri family shares an
intimate family discussion as director Omaima, 22, attempts to discuss
standards for intimate relationships with her own brother in her family
home.
Part of the film series Crossroads produced by
Shashat
(“Screens”), a Palestinian NGO in Ramallah that focuses on women’s
cinema and the social and cultural implications of women’s
representations in film and video, as well as on building capacity for
the Palestinian film industry, particularly women filmmakers.
Fureidis (‘Paradise’ in Arabic), a
small fishing village next door to Tantura, near Haifa, is one of the
few Arab villages Israel did not destroy in 1948. Paradise Lost
chronicles Mara’aneh’s semi-autobiographical quest to reconstruct, over
stiff social opposition from family and elders, the lost history of the
village where she grew up, especially why it was spared. Her quest for
understanding her own identity--as a Palestinian, as a woman, and as a
resident of the Arab village of Paradise (lost) within the Jewish state,
takes the filmmaker much farther afield than she plans.
• Sponsored
by: Boston College The Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts
The Fine Arts Department The Film Studies Program of Boston College
• Co-presented with: Women in
Film and Video in New England
• Winner:
2003 Int'l Spring Doc Festival, Best Script award for Co-productions,
First-Creation Photography Award, 2003 Women's Festival in Rehovot,
Documentary Award. Official selection London Human Rights Film
Festival
CROSSING LINES by
Andrew
Telling DOCUMENTARY SHORT | 2010 | 15
MIN.
Crossing Lines
documents Irish artist Conor
Harrington’s ‘street
art’ trip to Tel Aviv, Israel, and Bethlehem, Palestine in May 2010, in
collaboration with Know Hope, Zero Cents, and Wisam Salsaa.
My Land gives voice to Palestinian
refugees who have lived in camps in Lebanon for over 60 years after
being exiled from their homeland in 1948. Their stories are then shared,
via video, with young Israeli Jews who are building their country and
feel firmly attached to their land. The result: an otherwise impossible
conversation, which stirs deep emotions.
• Winner: Music and Editing,
National Festival of Film, Tangier, Morocco
A female director
auditions a Palestinian actor for a film describing an encounter between
an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Arab man. The line between the
film and reality is a fine one.
Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana, a
Palestinian citizen of Israel, leaves her childhood village of Fureidis
(Paradise) for an urban existence in Israeli-Jewish Tel Aviv. Filming
her own daily life as she goes, the filmmaker breaks all taboos and
strikes up a relationship with a fellow newcomer, her neighbor Jonathan,
a Jew from Canada who recently made aliya. She also joins the
Israeli Meretz party, dreaming of a future in politics. Life becomes
increasingly untenable as Israel invades Gaza in 2008-9, and Jonathan’s
Zionist grandfather arrives from Canada for a trip down nostalgia lane
to the kibbutz he helped to establish. As this intimate, raw, nuanced,
and thought-provoking cinéma
vérité film reminds us, love
can’t always conquer all.
• Sponsored
by: Boston College The Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts
The Fine Arts Department The Film Studies Program of Boston College
• Co-presented with: Women in
Film and Video in New England
• Awards:
Official
selection Hamptons International Film Festival
.......................................................................................................................................................................... Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Remis Auditorium :: 5:30
pm
Diaries
chronicles the intimate daily lives of three young women living in Gaza
who face a double siege: One is the Israeli occupation; the other, the
quasi-religious authority that controls the torn city.
"Documentary films like May Odeh’s
Diaries, do not just go on the shelves of your corporate bookstores or
to Amazon’s shopping carts. Like the activists in her films, we need to
make sure they are seen even if we have to climb through tunnels. The
beauty of Gaza and its resistance demands this." Nezar Andary,
Jadaliyya, August 2011
• Co-presented with: Women in
Film and Video in New England
In his Pastports, graphic artist
Rajie Cook narrates the tale of the poignant hardships of immigration
and estrangement in a documentary about his father’s first journey from
Ramallah to America in 1906.
.......................................................................................................................................................................... Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Remis Auditorium :: 8:00
pm
This remarkable animated
sand performance was played live on stage by its creator as part of the
"Third anniversary to commemorate the late President of Palestine,
Yasser Arafat" in November 2007.
What if Little Red Riding Hood (Warda,
or “flower” in Arabic) was born in Palestine?
This short animation was created
by 12 Palestinian children aged 8-12, in a project jointly led by AEI
and Caméra Etc. (Belgium). The film won in the 9-12 category of the
PLURAL + Youth Video Festival Awards, an initiative of the UN Alliance
of Civilizations and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)
– selected by an international jury out of more than 150 videos from 36
countries. The festival seeks to give voice to youth on integration,
inclusiveness, human rights, and social cohesiveness and also to promote
respect and appreciation for all people. The filmmakers were recognized
for their efforts to highlight migration, identity and diversity issues
at a United Nations-backed ceremony in New York.
If
every building has a story to tell, then Beirut’s Gaza Hospital, a
former vanguard medical center run by the Palestinian Red Crescent
Society and a key PLO institution, can recount a saga.
Marco Pasquini captures this saga using
rare archival footage and oral testimonies from former voluntary medical
staff and refugees currently living in the building. Until its fall, the
hospital served as a haven for injured and fleeing Palestinians and
Lebanese looking for a safe dwelling in the violent 1980s. It also took
in refugees after the 1985 War of the Camps, thus making it a “vertical
refugee camp” overlooking the existing Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Gaza Hospital
switches between past and present as it traces the history of this
building and the stories of the people who live or have worked in it.
Mesmerizing, masterful camera work follows the film’s characters as they
wander through space and time among the various manifestations of Sabra
Street. The hospital building persists as a symbol of the endless
struggle and suffering of a people. The film is a story of war,
resilience, and memory.
.......................................................................................................................................................................... Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Remis Auditorium :: 3:30
pm
Hoda Darwish, a 12-year-old from
Gaza, was shot in the head and blinded by an Israeli sniper’s
high-velocity bullet while sitting at her desk in a UN elementary school
in Khan Younis in 2003. She defied her doctors’ predictions by emerging
from a coma, then underwent years of gradual mental and physical
rehabilitation in Gaza, driven by determination to recover and buoyed by
an outpouring of support and love from her family and community.
Filmmaker Eriksson followed her with the camera over a number of years.
The Gaza Mono-Logues is a global
project organized by Ashtar Theatre in Palestine. Following Augusto
Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methods, 31 Gazan youths aged 14-18
engaged in intensive workshops and developed monologues expressing their
dreams, fears, frustrations, and aspirations--before, during, and after
the 2008-9 war -- memoirs of 22 days of living hell during which at
least 1,380 Palestinians died, 431 of whom were children.
On October 17, 2010, children from
40 countries performed the monologues simultaneously starting in Gaza,
where the initial group inaugurated the event by reciting their
monologues on the sea shore and sending them out as paper boats to the
world through the sea. In November 2010, a recital of Gaza Monologues
was also performed at the General Assembly of the United Nations in all
languages.
The film follows the group in
their training and shows how they were affected by the experience.
The monologues were written in
Gaza by: Ali Al Husseini, Ahmad Alrazi, Yasmeen Abu Amro, Ashraf Al
Susi, Hana’ Khillah, Rawand Jarour, Amani Shurafa, Mahmoud Al-Turk, Rima
Al-Sadi, Yasmine Jarour, Tayma’ Ukasheh, Ahmad Taha.
Three young Palestinian girls want to go
to the beach after one of them wins a prize to stay at a seaside hotel.
But first, they have to overcome several obstacles.
Part of
the film series Palestine Summer by
Shashat
(“Screens,”) a Palestinian NGO in Ramallah focused is on women’s cinema
and the social and cultural implications of women’s representations in
film and video, as well as to building capacity for the Palestinian film
industry, particularly women filmmakers.
After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in 1982, Ein al-Hilweh (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon)
was destroyed, and its men imprisoned. The Kingdom of Women
documents the resilience, community spirit, and valor of the women from
the camp during this period -- how they rebuilt the camp and protected
and provided for their families while their men were held captive.
Weaving between past and present, animation and daily life, Abourahme
honors women’s contribution to the survival of the Palestinian community
in exile.
• Awards:
Jury Award for Medium Length Films-Al Jazeera International Documentary
Film Festival, Doha, April 2011,.Audience Award 3rd Place-Dox Box
Documentary Film Festival, Syria, March 2011. Official selection at:
various festivals among them:
Among Women Filmmakers, Caravan of Arab and Ibero-American Women Films,
Cairo & Granada, May 2011 •Women Film Festival, Gaza, July 2011
Q&A with director as well as artist
Osama Zatar follows screening.
Osama, a Palestinian sculptor from Ramallah, and Jasmin, an Israeli
Jewish dancer, fall in love and try to build a life together against
nearly impossible odds. Israeli legal restrictions prevent them from
living together anywhere within greater Israel/Palestine, even as a
married couple, so eventually they attempt to relocate to Berlin, where
evermore bureaucratic regulations force them to live apart in waiting
even longer. They both resort to their respective arts to cope with the
separation, but it takes a heavy toll and at times threatens their
marriage.
Love During Wartime
takes viewers directly into Osama and Jasmin’s evolving lives as they
struggle to find a place where they can succeed not only as a couple,
but as individuals. Gabriella Bier's expertly edited, verité-style
visual commentary offers an uncannily intimate lovers' tableau and an
insider’s view of realities faced by many Palestinian families who
cannot live together because they happen to reside on the wrong side of
internal geographic red lines set by Israeli law. Determined to
transcend the boundaries of prejudice, Osama and Jasmin valiantly fight
against everything and everyone (including, sometimes, each other) to
find metaphorical and literal neutral ground – outside Palestine.
............................................................................................................................................ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Remis Auditorium :: 12:30
pm
Tracing the
intersecting destinies of comrades who were once bound by a shared
ideological affiliation and who remain tightly knit friends, We Were
Communists is an uninhibited examination of the legacy of Lebanon’s
civil war. Artistically and politically audacious, the film lays bare
the daunting reality of Lebanon’s fractured post-war landscape.
• Winner:
2010 Abu Dhabi International Film Festival Black Pearl Award for Best
Documentary by an Arab director or related to Arab culture
............................................................................................................................................
Saturday,
October 29
This poetic political film is a
documentary meditation on the experiences of famous French writer Jean
Genet, who lived among Palestinian resistance fighters in Lebanon and
Jordan in the 1970s. Years later, the day after the 1982 massacre at
Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Genet visited the camp. Suffering from
throat cancer, on the threshold of death, and having written nothing in
years, Genet began to write about this disturbing experience. It led to
an essay, “Four Hours in Chatila,” and his last book, Un Captif
Amoureux (Prisoner of Love), a memoir of the time he spent in
Jordan.
In Genet in Shatila, a young
Frenchwoman of Algerian origin returns to the landscapes of the
Palestinian resistance and the refugee camps, retracing his steps and
reading from Un Captif Amoreux. The film articulates Genet’s
aesthetics of resistance and revolution while asking what remains of a
revolution unfinished.
............................................................................................................................................
Saturday,
October 29
A short documentary, filmed in a single
day, which charts the desperate efforts of a Palestinian man digging a
tunnel from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, through to Egypt. A powerful and
sobering account of the realities of life in Gaza.
• Winner:
8th Dubai International Film Festival - Muhr Arab / Documentary
and Special Mention
Time races and stands still like a
treadmill of false hope in Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp outside
Beirut. Ubiquitous arrows pointing nowhere direct the viewer to the
unsettling truth: the residents of the camp seem to be going every which
way but out. Palestinian refugees have lived in Lebanon without any
basic civil rights, hanging eternally between a vanquished past and an
infinitely receding future. This film brilliantly evokes the predicament
of the Palestinian refugee perhaps better than any other. With stunning
use of sound and image, the film relates the texture of life in
permanent exile.
•
Winner:
Prix Ulysse at the 27th Festival International Cinéma
Méditerranéen de Montpelliero. Official selection at Paris, Festival du
Reel
............................................................................................................................................
Saturday,
October 29
A foreign woman (actress Hiam Abbass) is in a foreign
country; her beautiful generous body is her only form of identity. Away
from others' eyes, she has a light, happy moment of freedom for
herself.
With a title taken from Jean Luc
Godard’s La Chinoise, this “messy soup of art, alienation,
partying and politics”(Variety) follows Asya (Élodie Bouchez), a
successful visual artist in post- 9/11 Manhattan. She meets and falls
for a sexy med student (José María de Tavira) but finds herself
completely distracted by news that a childhood friend has disappeared
and may be a victim of a kidnapping in the Middle East. Javier finds
Asya's conspiracy theories overly paranoid—but nothing in Asya's world
is as it seems. Asya's life is reflective of the themes of cultural
fusion, and the complications and humor that arise simultaneously out of
everyday life.
.......................................................................................................................................................................... Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Remis Auditorium :: 12:00
pm
This black-and-white reconstruction of a
hugely important era in Egypt’s history broke every Egyptian box record
when it came out there. With seamless integration of newsreel footage,
the film reconstructs the period of 1956 when President Gamal Abdel
Nasser (Ahmad Zaki), a hero in the Arab world, nationalized the
strategically situated Suez Canal, the construction of which had cost
120,000 Egyptian lives when it was built during the previous century. An
international crisis involving the US, Israel, Britain, and France
ensued, but Egypt retained control of the strategic waterway.
The film provides an insightful historic
lens for viewing the revolutions that have catapulted across the Arab
world in the past year, and how Palestinians and others are viewing and
reacting to those events.
.......................................................................................................................................................................... Sunday, October 30
The Shu'afat refugee camp lies on the
edge of Jerusalem. Although Israel accepted responsibility for Shu’afat
and fully applied its law and authority there, it fails to provide even
basic services such as garbage collection or police. The Palestinian
Authority does not have authorization to work within Jerusalem, so the
camp has become a no-man's land plagued by garbage, drugs, and violence.
Out of this daily struggle for survival and identity rises G-Town, a
young Palestinian rap group, defining the Jerusalem style of Palestinian
hip hop.
Convinced that humor knows no
frontiers, young filmmaker Vanessa Rousselot embarks on an unusual
quest: to search for humor in the West Bank. At first she finds only
disillusionment – “our whole situation is a joke.” Little by little,
Rousselot uncovers and reveals Palestine’s own vibrant culture of humor,
one that occasionally challenges conventional expectations.
Inshallah
means ‘God willing,’ the
implication of this title being, “God willing, we’re going to the
Olympics in Beijing.” No other team in the world faces the challenges
that Palestinian athletes do in reaching the Olympics. Palestine isn’t
an organized state, the bureaucracy is in shambles, sport is not a
priority for the Palestinian Authority, there is no funding to speak of,
and the athletes must train without benefit of facilities. Ghadir dreams
that at last someone will buy her running shoes. Nader trains while
hoping that a missile doesn't land on him. Zakia hasn't got a permit
from the military authorities to get to the swimming pool. Though this
documentary has all the elements of a tragedy, it is anything but
tragic. Rather, it is a hopeful and inspiring story that mixes elements
of uproarious comedy with quiet determination.
• Winner:
2009 Al
Jazeera International Documentary Festival, Best Documentary on
Palestinian Affairs
In March 2009, in the wake of Operation
Cast Lead in Gaza, the Swedish city of Malmo refused to allow the public
to attend the first round of the Davis Cup tennis match between Sweden
and Israel. Malmo’s residents also organized strong solidarity protests.
This film chronicles the town debate and solidarity actions around the
match, which caused considerable controversy.
•
Winner:
Best
Director Award from International Epic of Resistance Film festival,
Beirut/Lebanon, 2010, Special Jury Award from The 11 Mogavemat
International film festival, Tehran/Iran
Twenty-something slacker Jawdat, a
Palestinian citizen of Israel, just wants to have fun with his friends,
talk on his cell phone, and find love. Instead, he navigates
unconvincing dates with Muslim, Christian, and even Jewish girls, and
wrestles with the Hebrew college entrance exam. Meanwhile, his father,
Salem, is determined to mobilize Jawdat and his whole community to
protest against a nearby Israeli cell phone tower that he fears is
radioactive and toxic.
As Salem’s efforts to have the tower
removed disrupt Jawdat’s precious cell phone reception, preventing any
further communication with his potential girlfriends, Jawdat is forced
to join the battle and grow up to be a man.
Copyright 2007-2011 Boston Palestine Film Festival
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