Line Halvorsen 2007 docu 99 min.
In 2003, Sami Al Arian was accused of giving material support to a terrorist organization and was held in solitary confinement for over three years. The case of Sami Al Arian was one of the first major tests of the Patriot Act, passed hastily after September 11, 2001. Al Arian’s six month trial ended without a single guilty verdict. But because the jury was hung on some of the counts Al Arian remained in jail as the prosecution threatened to retry him. This documentary is a close portrait of a Palestinian American family facing terrorism charges levelled by the U.S. Government. For years, Nahla Al Arian and her children fight to prove the innocence of husband and father Sami, a Palestinian refugee and university professor, who has lived in the USA for more than thirty years. The film covers the ordeal inflicted on his family by the trial and detention, and covers the Kafkaesque processes which force Al Arian, despite not being found guilty, to negotiate a plea bargain including his deportation… www.youtube.com
by Aseel Mansour 2011 docu 90 min.
A family chronicle, a tangled mystery story, and a privileged view on the Palestinian struggle, Uncle Nashaat begins with the filmmaker’s search for the circumstances of the 1982 death of his fighter uncle, his childhood hero. Cutting through the myths and following the clues, Mansour discovers a darker truth involving political rivalry, jealousy, family feud, and disputed property rights.
www.youtube.com
Sameh Zoabi / Narrative / Israel, Palestine, USA / 2013 / 84 mins
Shaul, an Israeli, and Nizar, a Palestinian, seem to have little in common, but for a shared spirit of entrepreneurship. They create a solar company with plans to bring renewable energy to communities in the Palestinian territories. Support for their venture is difficult to gain. From families who question them, to community members who threaten them, and government policies that make collaboration nearly impossible, Shaul and Nizar face many obstacles.
Watch Trailer: www.youtube.com
Israel, 2012, 48 minutes
Director: Emmanuel Rosen & Tali Rosen
The stories of talented young Muslim Israeli women stuck between two cultures, unable to belong to the community and tradition in which they were raised, nor to Israeli Jewish society. These vibrant women grapple with love, work, and the dilemmas of the modern world.
Jayce Salloum 2003 Drama 84 min.
Working directly and viscerally as well as metaphorically, this video art short by Lebanese artist Jayce Salloum provides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession. Moving between ambient imagery – orchids blooming – and news broadcast horrors the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre the study soon turns to the abstractions of space – clouds and satellite images. These images meet the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a refugee living in the Bourj El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, combining to produce an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. vimeo.com
by Ayreen Anastas (Pal), Rene Gabri (Iran), documentary 90 min. Palestine / Armenia / USA 2018. World premiere op Berlinale 2018.
In 2007 Ayreen Anastas made a journey through Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia, collecting materials for a film with the working title A Film for Every One and No One. The film was intended as an adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in the contemporary Arab world. Since that initial material was collected, much of the region and the world have been thrown into ever-greater tumult. The relevance, force, and meaning of the materials have also shifted significantly. The film remains unfinished.
In a collaboration with the artist Rene Gabri and the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, an attempt is made to approach the material in a collective manner and make an untimely version of it. For Nietzsche, untimely meant, among other things, something not belonging to the order of the tastes, expectations, and procedures of its time. If the original film was to stage an encounter between the writing and thinking of Nietzsche and the contemporary conditions of life as manifested in the Arab world, then this film stages that encounter in the lapse and disordering, in the historical black hole which has opened up in the ten years since the meeting was staged. www.berlinale.de
