Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 19, 2024

Yasmina Tawil did not expect her online calendar of Palestinian film screenings to gain traction beyond her friends and community. After Hamass October 7 attack and Israels subsequent assault on Gaza, which has been described by human rights organizations including the United Nations as a critical case of genocide, Tawil, the director of Film Programming at the Arab Film and Media Institute, noticed an increased interest in Palestinian cinema in New York.She started listing the events she came across on her website, and the Palestinian Film Calendar was born.Featuring screenings both online and in person, with synopses, times, venues, and links to purchase tickets, the user-friendly resource has been widely embraced.

Two years ago there would be like, three Arab films screening in the same weekend, and Id think, Oh my God, this is huge, Tawil told Hyperallergic. For there to be six plus months of Palestinian film screenings almost every single day across New York now is pretty incredible.

Anthology Film Archives, the Brooklyn Public Library, Nitehawk, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, DCTV Firehouse, the microcinema Spectacle Theater, and even grassroots collectives like cinemvil have taken the initiative to explore Palestine through the screen. While it was once a relative rarity to see work about Palestine, much less made by Palestinian filmmakers, it has become, in the last several months, a larger part of the repertory body, spanning different perspectives on the regions identity, culture, and politics.

For Kaleem Hawa, writer and co-curator with Nadine Fattaleh of the Cinema of Palestinian Return series at Anthology Film Archives in May, this moment provided the opportunity to challenge the notion that Palestinian cinema was primarily documentary or nonfiction.

We wanted to show Palestinian filmmaking grappling with the desires of the Palestinian people, using narrative features to help convey the force of those ideas, Hawa said in an interview with Hyperallergic. He felt it was crucial to illustrate both the formal and narrative imagination within the films, which included Khaled Hamadas epic The Knife (1972) and Borhane Alaouis Kafr Qasim (1975).

Another goal of the program was to reassemble a puzzle that he felt had been broken up.In response to the intention of the designers of the colonial project to fragment Palestinian people and scatter them across the world, we wanted to show how the cinema of the Palestinian national liberation struggle has been taken up by politically committed Arab filmmakers all across the world, Hawa said.

He added that many of the most significant films about Palestine themselves were not produced or shot in Palestine or directed by Palestinian filmmakers. The program was shaped by geography, with films from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Egypt, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Palestinian liberation struggle has begun to shape the publics relationship to arts institutions whose sources of funding may be linked to Palestinian oppression, resulting in widespread protests. Producer Abyn Reabe, who programmed You Killed Me, But I Forgot to Die: Films of Palestinian Dignity at Spectacle, observed the ways in which arts institutions selectively engage with this topic, citing Lincoln Centers 2023 New York Film Festival screening of The Dupes (1972). The film follows three Palestinian refugees trying to get from Iraq to Kuwait and was adapted from Liberation of Palestine leader Ghassan Kanafanis 1962 novella Men in the Sun.

Theres a painful irony of its screening in a place like Lincoln Center, because it underscores the untouchability of the donor class, Reabe told Hyperallergic. They dont need to worry about the optics of playing a Palestinian film, which is in direct contradiction to their [donors beliefs], because what actually matters is the money.

Spectacle, conversely, is entirely volunteer-run and describes its programming as having a political tenor. Films like The Time That Remains, a droll 2009 dark comedy about life under occupation by Elia Suleiman, are joined by nonfiction pieces such as R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022), Mohanad Yaqubis 16mm collage of Palestinian and Japanese testimonies on liberation.

Perhaps the shift away from traditional forms of distribution is an opportunity to expand how film, Palestinian or otherwise, can function as a form of community-building. While hosting mobile screenings in neighborhood spaces has been a part of cinemvil nycs ethos since it was founded in 2021, the film collective seized the educational opportunity during the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at Columbia University, showing Third World Newsreels (TWN) Columbia Revolt (1968), which documented the anti-Vietnam War protests that swept the university, and Between Two Crossings, a 2019 documentary about Gazan student Nour Al Ghussein.

JT Takagi, a member of TWN, and Desireena Almoradie, part of the Diverse Filmmakers Alliance, have been assembling free public screenings at places like the Brooklyn Public Library and noted that Columbia Revolt would be available to license in support of the student protests.

We havent gotten as many calls for our Palestinian films previously, Takagi told Hyperallergic. [Theres been] an increase in interest in a lot of our material.

One wonders to what degree that has to do with the problem of contemporary distribution. Dara Messinger, director of Programming at Firehouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan, said that Lyd (2023), a hybrid animated sci-fi film and documentary about the eponymous city in the heart between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had difficulties finding a distributor and struggled to get into festivals. In recent months, screenings of the film sold out.

Rather than drive people away from what has become a fraught subject, these films seem to have brought them together. The question remains as to whether Palestinian cinema, in all of its forms, will become better integrated into New York Citys vision of a global cinema that anyone can engage with and be a part of.

Hawa is a bit more skeptical. As the struggle continues, and as Palestine gets closer to liberation, we will then see a discursive or political shift that will make it more and more possible to show the types of films that we would like to, he opined.

I think some people think its the opposite that were somehow freeing Palestine by showing these films here, he continued. But I actually think that the events of the last seven months and the resistance of the people is the reason that we are able to push the envelope in our political and artistic advocacy.

Tawil shared the same sobering perspective regarding Palestinian and Arab cinema having a larger space in the repertory scene.

If and when there is a ceasefire, I do sometimes fear that some people whove been very active in the space will feel that theyve done enough, Tawil told Hyperallergic.

I really do hope its not like a flash in the pan and that people will continue to support the work we do across the Arab world, but especially in Palestine, she said.

Read more from the original source:

In New York City, Palestinian Cinema Returns to the Screen - Hyperallergic

Category: Palestine
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