“Sixty years after her grandparents’ exile from Jaffa, Soraya (Suheir Hammad) leaves Brooklyn to live in her homeland. Discovering that her family’s bank account was frozen after the Arab-Israeli War, she becomes determined to reclaim her birthright, through whatever means necessary.
“….a beautiful young Palestinian woman defies Israeli soldiers and struts through a check-point as if it were the catwalk of a fashion show; Santa Claus is chased up the sun- drenched hills of Nazareth by a gang of knife-wielding school kids; Israeli police use a blindfolded prisoner to provide directions to tourists in Jerusalem; and a female ninja descends from the sky, holding the map of ‘Palestine’ as her battle shield.”
Each film in the “It’s Not Just Documentaries Project” organized by the Community Media Center of Gaza addresses a particular aspect of the suffering among civilians and the violations of their rights during and after the 2014 Israeli aggression, which the IDF named “Operation Protective Edge.”
June 30, 2015 The Jerusalem Fund Cultural Programs Washington, DC Film Scholar Terri Ginsberg discusses Palestine-solidarity filmmaking, focusing predominantly on To Live in Freedom, a 1974 documentary directed by Simon Louvish, and featuring Palestinian writer and intellectual Fouzi El-Asmar. She examines the relationship between Zionism, European colonialism, class stratification and racism in Palestine/Israel, and … Read more
The Roof presents a portrait of Aljafari’s family in Ramleh and Jaffa, “guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafari’s family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project.”
Balconies is an experimental meditation focusing on the deteriorating and unfinished balconies of Kamal Aljafari’s home town Ramleh, inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romance Sonambulo, ‘But now I am not I, nor is my house now my house…’”
Leaving the Catholic orphanage in Jerusalem where she was raised, eighteen-year-old Badia arrives at the home of her spinster aunts in Ramallah. Crossing the threshold, she finds a house, and three lives, frozen in time. The sisters are the last remnants of the bourgeois Christian minority that stayed on in the city after the war.
1913: Seeds of Conflict examines the divergent social forces growing in Palestine before the outbreak of World War I that caused the simultaneous rise in Jewish and Arab nationalism. Combining the perspectives of a wide range of Arab, Israeli and American scholars, the film includes information from documents previously unavailable from the Turkish Ottoman archives and largely untouched by historians.
“Suspended Time was conceived as a way to understand the status quo of image production twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington, D.C. in 1993. The idea of producing short films around this concept came from our disability in seeing where we are standing today, both politically and cinematically.”
Through educational events, humanitarian support, and cultural preservation, the Jerusalem Fund is helping build the movement for Palestinian liberation.
Connect
The Jerusalem Fund
2425 Virginia Ave NW
Washington, DC 20037
(202) 338-1958