Cinema Palestina 8

Cinema Palestina (f)
'The Fading Valley'

Irit Gal 2013 | Documentary | 54 min
Trailer: www.youtube.com
Agriculture is disappearing in the fertile Jordan Valley, the lowest valley in the world, where a group of Palestinian farmers hidden from the eye are being pushed out, their pastures declared Israeli Military areas and their water supply diverted to Jewish use.

Fadwa

Liana Badr docu 1999 52 min.

Liana Badr’s film, Fadwa (1999), which recounts the life story of the Palestinian national poet, Fadwa Tukan, is an example of the growing tendency in Palestinian cinema to progress more swiftly and clearly from the starting point of social differences and the gap between the times to the final destination – national unity and restoration of the past.
The film opens with a journey through Nablus, its neighbourhoods, the mountains around it, and the three religions that found a place there. It utilizes conventions that conceive of Nablus as a symbol of the Palestinian peopled open heart, its tradition, its rich past, identifying, finally, the town where the woman loves. The poet’s narrative is one of oppression. At the age of twelve, as punishment for receiving a flower from a boy several years her senior, she was taken out of school and kept at home. The film describes how she overcame this oppression with the help of her brother, the poet Ibrahim Tukan, who encouraged her to write poems. Fadwa Tukan’s story, like that of the women in Fertile Memories, is a private tale of a woman rendered marginal in a patriarchal society. However, unlike the women in My Very Private Map she is rescued from this marginality when she becomes a national poet, and when she is associated with the city of Nablus and the Tukan family’s guesthouse, the Diwan, where she is filmed. The shots establish her in static poses under the curving arches of the house, next to the stone walls, among the clay pots, beyond the windows and iron latticework, under the adorned ceiling. Thus, she seems an integral part of this historic house that serves as a commemoration and a symbol of a long-lost world.
The film focuses on the details, granting them a symbolic dimension, A black scarf hanging from a branch of a tree, a familiar emblem of mourning, foreshadows the story of the brother’s death; a carnation floating in the water and gradually changing from its original white colour to red, symbolizes the death of a warrior that the poet has known. Other significant derails include a bouquet of flowers beside a record album, indicating her love of music; a pair of doves on the roof, suggesting her dream of becoming a bird; and two lemons on a saucer with a daffodil, signifying the Palestinian poets living within the Israeli borders, with whom she met after 1^67. These symbols associate national aspirations and grief with private hopes and mourning, constructing all of these as 3 kind of oriental ornamentation reminiscent of murals, embroidery, and pottery decorations, an ornamentation that revives she old Arab tradition of a female harem, steeped in scents and colours. Michel Khleifi, in Wedding m Galilee, uses this feminine adornment in order to deconstruct the national masculine unity; Liana Badr uses it to redefine woman as an allegory of the Palestinian and Arab nation, of its tradition, of lost Palestinian richness and wholeness. Palestinian and Arab critics often ignored the multi-dimensional women characters in Khleifi’s films and referred to them as national symbols. The new cinema actually realizes this interpretation more than Khleih’s own movies bad, since [he latter features women characters who are too complex to be reduced to this one-dimensional role.

Farha

M Anis Barghouti docu 40 min 1990?

Farha: By M Anis Barghouti features Palestinian women in the Intifada, following their lives at home, in the field, hospitals, factories, classes as well as economy projects and popular committees to portray a living image of people’s lives in the Intifada. –

FARHA is a 40 min’s film featuring Palestinian women in the Intifada.
Palestinian women played a very important role in the Palestinian national struggle since the turne of this century. During the Intifada she emerged as a corner stone in the daily struggle of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territorries. Women took a double responsibility on different levels, within the family and on the national scale. They appear today as a very active element in varicus aspects of the struggle inciucling that of leadership.
Rather than narrating the events and analysing them, this film leaves the participants the freedom to express themselves, thus presenting a more authentic image about their lives, suffering, struggle and future aspirations. We paid more attention to ordinary Palestinian women from various ages and different social backgrounds, ho played an effective role in the daily process of the Intifada and were affected by it.
We met those women and folowed their lives at home and in the field, in the hospitals and factories, in the popular classes, as well as participants in the household economy projects and the different popular committees. Through them and by their own accounts and experiences, we aimed to portray a living image of people’s lives in the Intifada.

Fatenah

Ahmad Habash – Animated Fiction 2009 28 min.

Fatenah is the first Palestinian animated short feature. It tells the story of Fatenah, a warmhearted woman living in the Gaza Strip with her father and sister. Her desires are simple – to maintain a normal life under the abnormal conditions in Gaza. But when Fatenah discovers a lump near her breast she will be compelled to embark on a journey of torment and loss in order to save these simple dreams from the shattering cruelties surrounding her. Based on a true story, Fatenah poignantly explores the many struggles standing between Gaza’s population and access to the most essential of health services. The film was funded by the World Health Organisation and has won several awards internationally. www.youtube.com

The Feeling of Palestine

Rikke Ruby, docu 32 min, 2014 Palestina

Rikke, a young Danish girl, travels to Ramallah for the first time in 2012 to create documentaries with Palestinians. The experience proves life changing, and she is deeply moved by the Palestinian situation and the power of storytelling to share it. Her heart draws her back to Palestine, against her parents’ wishes.

The Infiltrators

by Khaled Jarrar trailer: vimeo.com
The checkpoint is closed. “Detour, detour!” shouts a taxi driver and announces the beginning of the journey. The film unravels adventures of various attempts by individuals and groups during their search for gaps in the Wall in order to permeate and sneak past it.
Palestine, United Arab Emirates / 2012 / Arabic dialogue with English subtitles / Colour / Digital File / 70 minutes

The Road to Silverstone

by Johan Eriksson
2013 | Documentary | 57 min Trailer: www.youtube.com
A team of young, brave Palestinian mechanical engineering students succeed in building Gaza’s first Formula racing car despite failing to get crucial components from European suppliers due to the longstanding siege on the territory. Led by the relentless and visionary Ghassan Abu-Orf (PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Manchester), they face numerous seemingly impossible obstacles in their quest to take their invention to England to compete at the Silverstone racing circuit.
Winner:
Silver Prize, Objectif d’Argent at the Millenium Film Festival in Brussels

Shuja’iyah: Land of the Brave

by Hadeel Assali
2014 | Documentary Short | 5 min
One filmmaker’s personal reflection on the meaning of “crimes against humanity” in the context of Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ waged in the Gaza Strip in 2014, using footage of her family filmed in the summer of 2013 juxtaposed against audio from the summer of 2014.

Fire Lines

Director: David Viola & Avi Goldstein 2013, 42 minutes. Documentary

The story of the historic cooperation between firefighters of the Palestinian Civil Defense and the Israel Fire and Rescue Services during the tragic Carmel fire in December 2010. The blaze that began on Mount Carmel and swept through hills around the coastal city of Haifa was the deadliest in Israeli history, claiming 44 lives. It was also a cultural historic moment—producing unprecedented cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian firefighters. 
A Ma’an Network and Common Ground Production.

Foxtrot

van Samuel Maoz, fictie 108 min. Israel 2017, Hebreeuws gesproken. Ned. ondertiteld (IFFR 2018 + in roulatie)

Trailer: www.youtube.com
Een uur lang vreesde filmmaker Samuel Maoz dat zijn dochter dood was. Zo lang duurde het voordat hij haar te pakken kreeg, na een aanslag op een bus waar zij in had kunnen zitten. Dat onzekere uur, twintig jaar geleden, was het ergste dat hij zijn leven had meegemaakt – erger nog dan zijn oorlogservaringen, die hij verwerkte in zijn meesterlijke debuut Lebanon (2009).
Opvolger Foxtrot neemt dit persoonlijke trauma als uitgangspunt voor een verhaal over het gezin Feldmann. Vader Michael en moeder Daphna krijgen aan het begin van de film te horen dat hun zoon Jonathan is overleden tijdens zijn dienstplicht, als wachter bij een verlaten grenspost. De feiten blijken een stuk complexer. In drie stilistisch uiteenlopende delen vertelt Maoz het verhaal vanuit het perspectief van vader, zoon en moeder. Alle drie dansen ze de foxtrot met het noodlot. Een dans met vele variaties, maar: ‘waar je ook heen gaat, je eindigt toch weer op het punt waar je ooit begon.

Free Men in Exile (Ahrar Fil Manfa)

by Omar Kayed; Lebanon, 2017, 22 min, Arabic, Engl. ST
The Free Men in Exile movie talks about four Palestinian prisoners who were deported abroad upon demand from the Israeli occupation in the Wafa al-Ahrar deal. The first part of the movie is about their history of resistance, and the outstanding operations they planned or performed. The second part is concerned with how they were captured and their suffering in the occupation’s prisons. The third part covers Wafa al-Ahrar deal from the negotiation phase until obtaining freedom. In the fourth part, each resistance fighter tells us about the life he is leading and his work.

From Beneath the Earth

by Sami Alalul, documentary 21 min. 2017

Trailer: vimeo.com

From Beneath the Earth is a short documentary highlighting the struggles in life and art of five Palestinian musicians as they grapple with and attempt to transcend politics. It is produced by Mideast Tunes, the online platform promoting underground music from the MENA regions, in collaboration with Palestinian director Sami Alalul. The film features Mahmoud Jrere of acclaimed hip-hop duo DAM, West Bank hip-hop group Saaleek, Maysa Daw, and Haifa singer-songwriter Rasha Nahas.
However, the trailer purposely avoids naming the artists, aspiring to guide the focus of the film to the experience that any Palestinian could have making art under an occupation, rather than the artists as names themselves. From Beneath the Earth debuted this past October at The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, an event that unfortunately Alalul wasn’t able to attend due to the denial of his US visa. At 21 minutes, Alalul’s film promises to be a heartening and inspiring look into a topic that continues to remain poignant, eyes peeled for its release worldwide in January.

Filmmaker Sami Alalul (right) on set with Maysa Daw for his film From Beneath the Earth, which debuted at the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Sami Alalul)

First lesson

Areen Omari – 2010 Fiction 15 min.

Actress Areen Omari’s directorial debut reflects her own experience on first leaving Palestine. Having moved to Paris in order to find a new life without the daily stresses and tension of her hometown, she endeavours to make the new city a home. With First Lesson, in which Omari also stars as Salma, she offers a satirical depiction of that process, and of confronting perceptions of Palestine in the new city. The film’s title refers to her first French language lesson, the film’s centerpiece, in which she is faced with some surprising expressions of national identity from fellow students, and is required to establish her own relationship to her home country… and maybe even its existence.

First Love

Dima Abu Ghoush’s First Love reflects the experience of the first love among adolescent girls, with all its dreams and illusions. In the film, five girls living in Palestinian cities, aged between 19 and 22, speak out of their first loves, which either remained a great love in their real life or a memory in their hearts. Abu Ghoush says: “I have chosen a social and humanitarian topic rather than a political one, as is generally the case in Palestine… I think that it is very important to focus on humanitarian issues through our art work, especially that the whole world got used to the images of struggles and conflicts on our territories.”

Director: Dima Abu Ghoush Producer: Alia Arasoughly 13 mins. 2009, Palestine
A Shashat Production with support from the European Union
“Trust is very important. Parents who trust, advise and communicate with their children, help them to avoid making mistakes. But parents who are strict and believe that everything is forbidden or taboo, don’t help to level with their children. Girls will be secretive and make mistakes, and will then ask their teenage peers, who may lead them astray. Parents who are open and communicate well with their children, help them to avoid mistakes.” www.youtube.com

First picture

Akram al Ashqar – 2006 docu 27 min.

Nour was born in Israel’s Telmond prison, where his mother, Manal Ghanem from Tulkarm refugee camp, was being held. He lived for more than two and a half years with his mother in the prison before being separated from her while she remained in detention. The film joins Nour on his “release” and follows his first encounter with life outside an Israeli security prison. This beautifully composed debut documentary from Akram Al Ashqar, speaks of confusion and curiosity as Nour assimilates to a world populated not only by women, and where not all doors remain closed. Interviews with family members and friends provide a glimpse of his life inside the prison and reveal perhaps the most difficult aspect of all the fact that Nour misses the place where he was born: his mother’s cell which represented his only “world”.www.youtube.com

Five Boys and a Wheel

by Said Zagha Palestine/Jordan 2016, drama comedy, 19 min.
Producers Ahmad Khatib, Akram Ashqar, Said Zagha. Production company AKZ Collective

A young father (Ali Suliman) has to help his son out of a petty conflict with the neighbors. As the parents of each respective family are summoned, the discussions quickly spin out of control, testing the father’s values. Set in Jordan, this short film is an Arabic-language adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, ”Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes.”
Trailer: www.youtube.com
Trailer: www.youtube.com

Five Broken Cameras

53 min
De Palestijnse landarbeider Emad is inmiddels toe aan zijn vijfde videocamera. Iedere camera die kapot ging, vertelt een deel van het verhaal over het verzet van zijn dorp tegen de onderdrukking door Israël. De documentaire won op internationale filmfestivals inmiddels vele prijzen.
Emad woont in Bil’in, een dorp op de bezette westelijke Jordaanoever, op een paar kilometer afstand van de muur die Israël bouwt om de oprukkende Joodse nederzettingen te scheiden van de Palestijnse dorpen. Met de eerste camera legde hij vast hoe in 2005 de bulldozers kwamen om olijfbomen uit de grond te trekken ten behoeve van de muur, die dwars door het land van zijn dorpsgenoten verreist.
In die eerste dagen, waarin het verzet tegen de Joodse kolonisten en de alom tegenwoordige Israëlische soldaten op gang komt, wordt Emads vierde zoon Gibreel geboren. Beelden van de boreling die uitgroeit tot een vroegwijze kleuter, van de vele vreedzame protestacties en de gestaag vorderende bouw van de scheidingsmuur wisselen elkaar af. Het verzet groeit, mensen uit de hele wereld komen helpen. Maar de strijd wordt grimmiger, er worden mensen gearresteerd en er vallen dodelijke slachtoffers in het dorp. Emad blijft filmen, ondanks de smeekbeden van zijn vrouw die bang is voor represailles. Hij maakt zo een zeer persoonlijk en indringend document over de strijd van een dorp tegen geweld en onderdrukking. www.youtube.com

Five minutes from home

Nahed Anwar – 2008 docu 52 min.

The Jerusalem Airport lies on the road that links Jerusalem with Ramallah. Five kilometres from Ramallah and 10 kilometres from Jerusalem, the airport has been occupied by Israeli army since 1967. Today, to the east of the runway, a checkpoint blocks the Jerusalem to Ramallah road: a dead end street. 5 Minutes From Home shows that life was not always like this: this was once a place where international flights landed and Palestinians travelled freely, not just in Palestine, but globally. The happy images and testimonies of the past she compiles contrast with a present where access to the airstrip is prevented by behind barbed wire and the creeping advance of the West Bank Wall.

Fix me

Raed Andoni – 2009 docu 89 min.

Raed Andoni has a tension headache—one that has lasted generations and isn’t going to end soon. That’s because Andoni is a Palestinian living in the Ramallah, where the prospects for a stressfree life are elusive. Fix Me follows Andoni through 20 therapy sessions as he tries to cure his unwelcome condition. The internal terrain of displacement and alienation that is revealed to his therapist and through his daily encounters with friends and family mimics the lived reality of thousands of Palestinians who are themselves displaced from their history and homeland. Ironic in tone, stylishly shot, and with a haunting score, Fix Me deftly plays with the concept of detachment from every angle. In Andoni’s hands, life under occupation is rendered with sly humour and an unexpectedly light touch, culminating in a poignant statement about the universal longing for a way back home. (Synopsis courtesy of Sundance Film Festival). www.youtube.com

The Flat

Arnon Goldfinger docu 2011 Israël/Duitsland 97 min

De grootouders van regisseur Arnon Goldfinger woonden in een Bauhausgebouw in Tel Aviv sinds zij in 1930 vanuit Duitsland naar Palestina waren geëmigreerd. Als je niet uit het raam keek, leek het net of de flat in Berlijn stond. Toen Goldfingers grootmoeder overleed op 98-jarige leeftijd, ontdekte hij talrijke objecten, foto’s, brieven en papieren die geheimen onthulden over het verleden. www.youtube.com

Flee

Ahmad Habash. Fictie 3 min, 2006 Palestina. Geen dialogen
In 2006, Ahmad directed and animated “Flee”, a short Sand animation as part of the Palestinian filmmaker collective’s project “Palestine, Summer 2006”. “Flee” reflected a new turn in his artistic orientations and was screened in many prestigious festivals all over the world. www.youtube.com

Flipping out

Yoav Shamir – 2008 docu 60 min

Language: Hebrew with English subtitles. Documentary by Yoav Shamir about the extreme drug use of Israeli soldiers in India. Military service in Israel is compulsive for all able-bodied Jewish men and women. Once their years of service are up they are granted a bonus which many use to travel to India to wind down and recover from their experiences. About 90 per cent of them will use drugs during their travels and every year about two thousand of them will require professional help to recover from this drug use. The extreme psychotic break these people experience is commonly referred to as “flipping out”. Shamir spends two years with his camera filming this phenomenon and makes the link between the excessive drug use and the soldiers’ experiences in the occupied Palestinian territories. Biography. Yoav Shamir is an Israeli documentary filmmaker born in Tel Aviv in 1970. He graduated from Tel Aviv University with a BA in History and philosophy. He is most noted for the films Checkpoint and Defamation. Shamir’s films have received awards from various independent film festivals including Best Feature Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the Grand Prize at the Sundance film festival and the Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Trailer: www.youtube.com

Flower Seller

Ihab Jadallah fictie 18 min. Palestine/France/England 2011

In a refugee camp in Jenine, a flower seller struggles to earn a living, selling flowers at funerals, especially when martyrs are buried. Yet no one really cares for his flowers in this camp where opportunities for celebration and joy are scarce. He is an easy prey for the Israeli secret service.

Trailer: www.youtube.com

Flying paper'

Nitin Sawhney, Roger Hill – 2013 docu 71 min.

Flying Paper documents a spectacular quest by Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip to break the Guinness World Record for the most kites ever flown. Coproduced with young Palestinians trained by the filmmakers through a youth media programme (Voices Beyond Walls), the film celebrates the creative resilience of children facing extraordinary hardship in their daily lives. Scored by the codirector’s namesake, Nitin Sawhney, the film combines animated sequences with footage of the recordbreaking bid and portrayals of the film’s protagonists. www.youtube.com

For cultural purposes only

Sarah Wood – 2009 docu 7 min.

In an age dominated by the moving image what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from? The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli assault of Beirut in 1982. In Sarah Wood’s meditation on this loss and its significances, interviewees recall from memory key scenes and moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. The scenes are each drawn and animated. Where film survives, the interviewee’s impressions are “corroborated” by way of the original films. This is a study of reconstruction and of cinema’s involvement in the formtaking of cultural identity – of an idea that cinema, even in its absence, fuels memory.

Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land

Michel Khleifi – docu – 66 min 1995

Khleifi interviews nine inter-faith and inter-racial couples in Israel, asking each where they met, how they have addressed religious or cultural differences in their marriage, how their families have responded to the relationship, and how they chose where to live. He also has a professor and three religious leaders comment: a sheikh, a rabbi, and a priest. The three religious spokesmen are dead set against inter-faith marriage, while the couples express themselves in simple terms about their partner’s kindness and other human qualities.

Forbidden Pilgrimage

by Ahmad Damen (also script), docu 50 min. Qatar 2013 V

A comparison between Roman persecution of Christians and pilgrimage journeys, and the reality of the Holy Land under the Israeli occupation. Since the early centuries of Christianity, pilgrims have been treading Jesus Christ in the Holy Land, particularly to visit the sites connected with the ministry of Jesus. More than two million Christian pilgrims visited the historical Palestine in 2012 and the numbers are rising steadily every year. Israel promotes its current control of the Holy Land as a heavenly blessing to Christians worldwide. However, the biblical route relevant to various religious sects is turning into an abandoned one today. This is because pilgrims flocking to the holy land from all parts of the world are being misled by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and the Israeli agencies. The native Palestinian Christians are experiencing a new age of persecution. In addition to daily harassment, vandalism and killing of pastors by Israeli gangs, the separation wall and checkpoints divide their country and limit their freedom. They view this as an effort by the Israeli government to evacuate the holy land of its local…www.youtube.com

Ford Transit

Hany Abu Assad – 2002 docudrama 80 min.

Director AbuAssad accompanies Palestinian taxi driver Rajai and his passengers as they attempt to circumnavigate and make sense of the mesh of physical, political and emotional barriers that delimit their lives in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Mixing scripted scenes with reality, the film’s humor and sincerity gives voice to a range of revealing personal opinions about circumstances in Palestine during the latest Intifada. Winner: Spirit of Freedom Award for Best Documentary – Jerusalem Film Festival, 2002. Winner: FIPRESCI Award – Thessaloniki Film Festival, 2003.

The Foreigner

by Natalie Al-Jubeh, docu 15 min. 2017.

Don Hutchison, an American born in Pennsylvania, came to Palestine in 1965. Since then, he has considered himself Palestinian.
Producer: Mashahid Production Co. and support Filmlab

Forget Baghdad
[full title: “Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – the Iraqi connection”]

Samir – 2002 docu 110 min.

Iraqi Swiss filmmaker, Samir, takes on stereotypical and historically novel distinctions between ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’ in this deeply thoughtful film about Iraqi/Jewish communists who left Iraq for Israel in the 1950s. Drawing on insightful interviews with academics (including Ella Shohat), novelists (Sami Michael and Samir Naqqash) and other ‘Iraqi Israeli Jewish Arabs’, as well as upon archival research and footage, the film explores a fascinating set of political, cultural, religious, national and linguistic tensions linked to the emergence of new and potentially exclusive ways of identifying as Jewish or Arab. In so doing, the film confronts central issues of identity at the heart of national and ethnic conflict. Winner – Zurich Film Prize, 2002 Critics Week Prize, Locarno, 2002. www.youtube.com

Forgiveness

Aloni – 2006 fiction 97 min.

On April 9, 1948, a Jewish militia entered the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and killed over 100 villagers.
Soon after, a mental hospital was built on the ruins. The first patients to be committed were Holocaust survivors.
A legend says that to this day, the survivors have been communicating with the ghosts of the village.
David Adler, a 20-year old American-Israeli who decides to move back to Israel, only to find himself committed to a mental institution that sits on the ruins of a Palestinian village called Deir Yassin. 

Flashbacks and flashforwards reveal the events that led up to his hospitalization. A 10-year old female ghost holds the secret to the riddle. But only when the secret is revealed can she find rest and give David the option to end a perpetually-repeated destiny… 

  Doctor Itzhik Shemesh, a psychiatrist at the mental institute, injects David with a chemo-technological drug in an attempt to build a bridge over the trauma zone and allow David to live a normal life. Even though he doubts its ethical consequences, his use of the drug is an act that mirrors his own deep denial… 

Doctor Shemesh is given permission to use the drug by David’s father, Henry Adler, a Holocaust survivor who spent a short time in Israel before becoming one of the most pre-eminent musicians in America. 

Henry, who has the arrogance of Oedipus and faith in the rational overcoming of trauma via action, doesn’t understand why his son has been hospitalized. But Henry’s lust for life and his desire for normality make him live in denial of the past, which is unbearable for David, whose restless soul seeks the truth. Henry will confront a horror beyond all horrors when the truth reveals itself. 

A blind patient in the hospital named Muselmann, also a Holocaust survivor, tells David to listen to the ghosts that are haunting him, that they have something important to tell him. 

Like the blind prophet Tiresias, Muselmann knows that the truth does not hold redemption, and this is why he never tried to reconstruct his life after the camps. Because he lives between the world of the dead and the living, Muselmann can act as a conduit between the murdered ghosts and David. 

The flashbacks and flashforwards from the mental institute reveal, with the story of David’s life, the story of the eternal return of the trauma and a destiny that seems unalterable…

The Forgotten
Ehab Tarabieh fictie 21 min. Syrië 2012
Mustafa steals across the Israeli border with the help of a local smuggler. This is a one-way trip for him as he contemplates the end of his life. Forty-five years ago, Mustafa was forced from his home in the Golan Heights; his attempt to return is confounded by his inability to remember where he is going.
trailer: www.youtube.com
443

Route 443 begins on the shore near Tel Aviv and ends in Jerusalem. This route has long been a vital communication axis, invested with geographic, security, and even spiritual significance over the years. It has also been the site of conflicts dating back millennia. Adopting the playful style of a video “tour guide”, Erez Miller’s documentary brings together a series of vignettes and character portraits to convey a picture of life around, and along, the highway today. Equal parts satire and investigative report, 443 offers a new and inventive take on that rich subgenre of films on Palestine/Israel, “the political road movie”. www.youtube.com

 

The Fourth Room

Nahed Awwad – 2005 docu 25 min.

Abu Jameel owns a small stationary shop in Ramallah. Nothing has changed in this shop since the fifties. The lack of freedom of movement and recurring military raids have left him with a general sense of insecurity. Director Nahed Awwad, approaches him gently, asking him about his dreams, his past, and eventually… his secret rooms. This study of a individual’s memories, treasures and yearnings offers viewers an insight into one man’s inner world.

Free running, Gaza

George Azar, Mariam Shahin – 1999 docu 25 min.

Free Running, Gaza depicts the thoughts and dreams behind the first Gaza Parkour Team, an initiative of two 22–year–old friends, Mohammed al–Jakhbeer and Abdallah Enshsi. Seen through the eyes of this inspirational duo, Parkour, a high octane urban acrobatic sport, forces people to look at obstacles as challenges, and even opportunities. Mariam Shahin and George Azar’s doc follows the ingenious duo as they chart out new spaces to develop their sport, find new stunts to master, and use the internet to share their achievements with a global fraternity of “free runners”.

Freeflow

Director: Ramy A. Katz Israel 2011 60 minutes 

The story of a mother of six in a provincial town, fighting to keep her family together with sheer courage and wisdom. Her eldest son, dropped out of school and has created an alternative reality for himself in which he is a daredevil putting his energy into the physical sport of Parkour. www.youtube.com

Friendship's Death

Peter Wollen – 1987 fiction 78 min.

1970: A war correspondent played by Bill Paterson is covering the Palestinian revolution from Amman as the civil war and events of “Black September” begin to erupt around him. Amidst the chaos, he encounters an extraterrestrial, superbly rendered by Tilda Swinton in one of her first lead roles. Almost entirely structured around dialogue between Swinton and Paterson, the script unfolds as a series of questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to have one’s humanity withheld. Wollen, who co wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) manages to bring science fiction to bear on political history masterfully in a film which shifts constantly from the bizarre to the profound and enjoys formidable performances by two of Britain’s finest actors.

From Al-Araqib to Susiya

by Jenny Nyman
Two Palestinian villages – one in Israel, one in the West Bank – share a single story of a struggle against forced displacement. The parallels are striking.
Al-Araqib is a Palestinian Bedouin village in Israel whose residents are Israeli citizens. As of April 2013, Israel had destroyed the village 49 times to make way for two Jewish National Fund (JNF) forests. Susiya is a Palestinian village in Area ‘C’ of the West Bank whose residents live under Israeli Occupation. The majority of structures in Susiya are subject to demolition orders, and Israel intends to forcibly displace the community to make the land available for a Jewish settlement.
Commemorating the Nakba should not only include remembering the deaths and displacement that were part of the disaster that befell the Palestinian people in 1948, but should also expose ongoing Israeli policies to dispossess Palestinians of their land until today.
In conjunction with the film, Adalah also released a report entitled Forced Displacement on Both Sides of the Green Line.”
The report reveals strong similarities between the Naqab (Negev), where over 2,200 houses were demolished and more than 14,000 people displaced between 2008 and 2011, and Area C of the West Bank, where more than 1,000 buildings were demolished and 2,200 people displaced between 2008 and 2010. In addition, the Israeli government’s future plans for each area are remarkably similar: in Area C plans include the demolition of 38 Palestinian villages, and the Prawer Plan in the Naqab will forcibly displace up to 70,000 Palestinians from their land in the 35 unrecognized Bedouin villages. www.youtube.com

Frontiers of dreams and fears

Mai Masri – 2001 docu 56 min.

“Frontiers of Dreams and Fears” compares the experiences of refugees in Lebanon and the West Bank through the correspondence of two refugee girls who eventually meet.

Offering a rare glimpse into one side of the Middle East conflict, Frontiers of Dreams and Fears explores the lives of a group of Palestinian children growing up in refugee camps. The film focuses on two teenage girls, Mona and Manar. Although living in refugee camps miles apart, the girls manage to communicate and become friends with each other despite the overwhelming barriers separating them. The film reveals their lives and dreams and their growing relationship, at first through email, then culminating in their dramatic meeting at the fence that separates them at the Lebanese/Israeli border. www.youtube.com

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