– Edward Said
The late Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, remarked that Palestinians had been denied permission to narrate their history and speak of the day-to-day experiences of life in the margins. Here, we reclaim that permission to narrate our own stories.
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This feature-length documentary explores the concept of Palestinian cinema produced by an effectively stateless people. Cinema Palestine combines in-depth interviews with directors including Hany Abu-Assad, Azza el-Hassan, Sobhi Zobaidi, Mai Masri, Tawfik Abu Wael, Annemarie Jacir, and many more, along with excerpts from their films.
Composed entirely of footage from Israeli and American fiction features shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, Aljafari removes the Israeli actors to give the stage to people who appear by chance in the background, including both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews who were settled in the city. In so doing, he performs what he calls “cinematic justice” to the people who were made to appear as extras.
Set in a women’s hair salon in Gaza during a confrontation between the police and a local gangster, effectively trapping the women inside, Degrade blends caricature and reality to emphasize the complexity of life in Gaza where people are afflicted by multiple nodes of pressure and the social space of women is increasingly circumscribed by these pressures.
From cars, handbags, street walls as well as human bodies, Khaled is leaving his prints almost everywhere in the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Islamist Hamas movement and under blockade by neighboring Egypt and Israel.
Last month, a new English-language guide to Jerusalem’s Old City was published, featuring fifty-seven tourist sites. Among them, only one was Muslim, five were Christian, while a whopping fifty-one were Jewish. Distributed for free at tourist offices, the map undermines Palestinian political claims to Jerusalem through a deliberate cultural whitewash that re-imagines the historically multi-ethnic and multi-religious city as exclusively Jewish.
This Pesach (Passover), young Jews across the United States under the banner of IfNotNow are calling for a sea change in American Jewish consciousness and an end to American Jewish support for the Israeli occupation. On April 19, I stood with 100 young American Jews in the office lobby of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to say we support freedom and dignity for all Palestinians and Israelis. This week, in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago and San Francisco, hundreds of young American Jews are holding ritual protests and getting arrested to say we have had enough. I feel the yearning of a generation to tell a new story of what it means to be Jewish.
The film follows an elderly couple, Yousef and Amna, in their final stand-off with Israeli authorities to keep their rustic home, a shack in the Roshmia valley in Haifa. A friend encourages them to leave and works to secure municipal compensation for the couple, but tensions grow between Yousef, who refuses to leave his home, and Amna, who seeks to move on.
On the Bride’s Side records the 2013 journey of five undocumented Syrian and Palestinian refugees who end up in Italy fleeing the war in Syria, and with the help of the filmmakers, continue on from Milan to Stockholm where they seek to attain political asylum. The refugees and their supporters travel as a fake wedding party complete with a bride in a white gown, hoping to avoid detection and arrest.
“Whatever becomes of the politics of Egypt’s ‘Arab Spring,’ the future of the country’s blooms certainly appears bright, colorful and clear. Really clear.” – John A. Bray
Through educational events, humanitarian support, and cultural preservation, the Jerusalem Fund is helping build the movement for Palestinian liberation.
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